By the beginning of 1788 the friendship was so firmly established as to survive a most humiliating incident. When he visited Dunlop House on his way back from Edinburgh in February his reception was warm and flattering. Mrs. Dunlop’s unmarried daughters were agog with admiration. Miss Rachel was hard at work on a painting of his muse, Coila, as to whose appearance she sought the poet’s expert advice. Miss Keith discussed poetry with him and revealed the somewhat surprising fact that she had never read Gray. Before he left he had promised to lend the ladies his copy of Spenser, a recent gift from William Dunbar of Edinburgh. When a few days later he fulfilled his promise he added to the parcel a copy of Gray as a present for Miss Keith, only to learn that a plebeian poet must not presume too far. Mrs. Dunlop replied that she did not allow her daughter to receive presents from men who were not members of her own family, and proposed either to return the whole book or at most to permit Miss Keith to tear out the pages containing the poems she liked best. That Burns continued in friendship with Mrs. Dunlop after this rebuff is eloquent proof of the esteem in which he held her; he had lampooned others of the gentry for less. Not that this was the only time when Mrs. Dunlop made him conscious of the difference in their ranks. Her occasional gift of a five-pound note, though usually tactfully designated as for some special purpose or occasion, always hurt his pride--the more so because he could not deny that he needed the money. He silently drew the line, however, when she proposed, in one of those fits of economy which sometimes afflict the well-to-do, that he help to sell some decorative fringe which she had been manufacturing. Over this as over others of his sins of omission she displayed an irritability more like a schoolgirl’s than a grandmother’s; most schoolgirlish in its evanescence. A thorough scolding which sounded like a total breach of relations would be countered by some new poems or new compliments from Burns, and her next letter would contain a five-pound note for the latest baby.