It is certain that the Carlyles were an ill-assorted couple. She considered from the beginning that to marry him was an act of condescension on her part. The daughter of a country doctor at Haddington had descended from the skies like Diana to Endymion to marry the son of a stone-mason! I feel inclined to say “Poor Endymion!” But he loved her and was happy in his love. Not so she! Jealous of him she was—furiously jealous—not as a lover, for there she knew she was safe. But she could not bear to think that if she was famous it was as his wife, whereas she, knowing herself to be brilliant, would fain have had him to be known as the husband of that wonderful Mrs. Carlyle. It was his success, social and literary, that she resented; it irked her to be in the second place, and she could not forgive it. That she entertained any sentimental feeling about Carlyle’s intimacy with Lady Ashburton is an absurd supposition hardly worthy of contradiction. Harriet Lady Ashburton was an ideal _grande dame_, accomplished, well read, with a strong spice of Irish wit inherited from her mother Lady Sandwich, who was a Corry, a daughter of Lord Belmore; I knew her from my childhood up, indeed it was at the Grange that my father and aunt made the acquaintance of the Carlyles, who met there a whole galaxy of famous people, Thackeray, Charles Buller, Fleming, Monckton Milnes, Dickie Doyle, Titania’s favourite painter, and a host of others, all of whom were like the Ashburtons, hearty admirers of Carlyle’s genius. Mrs. Carlyle was always welcome either at the Grange or at Addiscombe, but he was the sun, she the moon—the satellite. There was something else of which the lady was jealous, and that was the agony of concentration which her husband’s work meant for him. At moments her _sæva indignatio_ against “that Carlyle,” as she would somewhat contemptuously call him, passed all bounds. One day my aunt went to call upon her and found her in one of her tantrums—what was the matter, she asked: “Oh! my dear, it’s just that Carlyle! Would you believe it, I have had a headache for three days, and he’s only just found it out. ‘I’m afraid you’re not quite well, my dear,’ he said—and all the time he has been working, working! I just threw a tea-cup at his head.” Petruchio had a bad time of it that day. Another time “that” Carlyle was in great disgrace and Mrs. Carlyle in tears because the poor man had resented the presence of a dead mouse embalmed in his porridge at breakfast.