The secret of Willis’s agreeableness to ladies lay in his unfailing deference. It is extraordinary how many women much older than himself cherished a warm affection for him. He had considered the meaning of Bacon’s saying, “No Youth can be comely, but by Pardon,” and several of his stories are studies on the thesis that there is a beauty in age which may inspire passion. One in particular, not found among his collected writings, deals with this speculation: “Poyntz’s Aunt,” published in “The Ladies’ Companion” of December, 1842, where the hero falls violently in love with a woman of sixty, to whose niece the family expected him to pay his court. Willis saw more “life” in London than was quite good for him, and went into companies which were less select than the Gore House coterie, although, to say truth, Lady Blessington herself was looked upon by “the best people” as a trifle off color. Her house was frequented by men who were entirely irreproachable, but the English ladies were shy of visiting there. This was due mainly to her rather unusual relations with the Count d’Orsay. In obedience to the wishes of the Earl of Blessington, his daughter by a former marriage had been compelled to wed the count under penalty of forfeiting her inheritance. The poor girl reluctantly espoused the brilliant stranger provided for her by her father’s eccentric caprice; but the match was unhappy, and was almost immediately followed by a separation; notwithstanding which, D’Orsay continued to live in the closest intimacy with his wife’s stepmother after the earl’s death, and in time under the same roof with her. This last arrangement, which was, to say the least, odd, and caused much scandal in British society, had not, however, gone into effect when Willis first came to London. Lady Blessington had not as yet moved to Gore House, but was living in Seamore Place, while D’Orsay had lodgings in Curzon Street. Nor did the latter’s formal separation from his wife take place till 1838. Another intimate friend of Willis in London was that very unconventional, not to say rapid, woman, Lady Dudley Stuart, the daughter of Lucien Bonaparte, “a lady of remarkably small person, with the fairest foot ever seen,” under whose bonnet “burn the most lambent and spiritual eyes that night and sleep ever hid from the world.” She had about her a semi-foreign society, not without its fascinations, of artists, actors, opera-singers, refugee nobles, and adventurers of more or less shady antecedents. In his “Sketches of Travel” Willis described a very free and easy supper party, following a private concert given by Lady Antrobus, at which he and Lady Dudley Stuart assisted, together with Grisi, Lablache, Rubini, and other members of the Italian opera troupe then in London. Of course neither Lady Antrobus nor Lady Stuart was mentioned by name in this account.