The history of the first few months of his friendship with Mrs. Dunlop reveals how far Burns was from understanding the finer points of etiquette. To begin with he ignored her suggestions for altering his poems. True, he could do nothing else. Her advice was merely typical of what genteel Scotland thought about his work. To accept all emendations would have reduced his poems to namby-pamby; to accept some and reject others would have doubly offended those whose criticism he ignored. But he should have explained this to Mrs. Dunlop, and did not. Her vexation at the discovery was intensified by an innocent blunder he made in arranging for the delivery of copies she had ordered for her stepmother, the dowager Lady Wallace of Craigie. The copies went instead to the estranged wife of her eldest son, also a Lady Wallace but regarded by her mother-in-law as the worst blemish the family tree had ever suffered. Their relations were first put on a really cordial basis when Burns visited her at Dunlop House in July, 1787. Annoyance at his social blunders evaporated before the charm of his personality, and thereafter the correspondence on both sides took a new tone of affection and esteem. Her interest in Burns was generous and motherly. She plied him with good advice, which he generally ignored, and frequently added substantial help with both money and influence. Towards her Burns seems to have felt as many a man does towards his mother--she bored him but he loved her. She often accused him, no doubt justly, of not reading her letters. They were long, tedious, and wholly unpunctuated; he probably glanced over them when they arrived and then laid them aside for more careful reading at a leisure hour which never came. But though he seldom answered her questions he took her unreservedly into his confidence--or almost unreservedly. He never did more than hint about Clarinda, but he told her everything about Jean. In fact he must have told almost too much; it is hard otherwise to explain his embarrassment over breaking the news that he had finally married the girl who had borne him ‘twice twins in seventeen months’.