Intermittently she acted in the provinces with strolling companies of low calibre and continually bankrupt, and for a long time she and another actress stayed together through thick and thin, the friend caring for her during three years of “nervous fever and lowness of spirits.” At one point she lets slip that this woman passed in a tight place as “Mrs. Brown,” and since “Mr. Brown” was the name Charlotte took whenever she needed an alias, it may be that they lived outside the theatre as man and wife. Finally, they abandoned acting for a time at Chepstow in Wales because Charlotte “met with many friends,” particularly another widow who lent her considerable sums of money, and a younger woman who gave her the use of “a very handsome house with a large garden, near three quarters acre of ground” which had just been inherited. The latter also wrote her “very friendly letters” when she went on short trips. At that time, she attempted to run a bake-shop, still with her faithful friend the actress, who she says now stayed on “only out of sincere friendship and an uncommon easiness of temper,” a suggestion that might well imply a more cogent previous reason. As was said, none of these passages mentions variance, but taken all together and in conjunction with the dark mystery she makes of her first experience in men’s clothes,[5] as well as her family’s relentless disowning of her, they make a picture which seems to justify her inclusion in a conjectural record. *“The Ladies of Llangollen.”* Charke’s history brings us to the late eighteenth century, a period when the Age of Reason had passed its peak and the deifying of emotion which characterized the Romantic Period was beginning to appear. Blanche Hardy, in a biography of the Princess de Lamballe, says: It was the age of great friendships: girls and even grown women carried the miniature of another woman about with them in a locket, bracelet or other ornament, would draw it out occasionally when in company, gaze fondly upon it, and press it to their lips; wrote long and loverlike letters to the beloved object, awaited her coming ardently, and wept storms of tears at her departure.[1]