Pale-blue carpets, silver lamps, ornaments silvered to correspond.... The salle de bain is draped with white muslin trimmed with lace.... The bath is of white marble, inserted in the floor, with which its surface is level. On the ceiling a painting of Flora scattering flowers with one hand, while from the other is suspended an alabaster lamp in the form of a lotus. It was in this house that Lord Blessington died, of apoplexy, in 1829; perhaps after a glimpse of the bills for renovating the place. Marguerite, on his death, was left with a jointure in his estate--which estate by this time had dwindled to fifty thousand dollars per annum. Her sole share of it was seven-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, and the Blessington town house in London. All along, D'Orsay and his wife had been living with the Blessingtons. When Lady Blessington came back to England, they accompanied her, and the three took up their odd form of life together at Gore House, in Kensington--Albert Hall now stands on its site--for Marguerite could not afford to keep up the Blessington mansion. She tried to eke out her income by writing, for she still had the pen gift that had so awed her brothers and sisters. One of her first pieces of work was a book based on her talks with Byron, back in the Genoa days. The ~New Monthly Magazine~ first printed serially this capitalization of a dead romance. The volume later came out as "Conversations With Byron." And, of all Marguerite's eighteen books, this is, perhaps, the only one now remembered. She was engaged, at two-thousand-five-hundred dollars a year, to supply a newspaper with society items. Then, too, she edited "Gems of Beauty," a publication containing portraits of fair women, with a descriptive verse written by her under each picture--straight hack work. Altogether, she made about five thousand dollars a year by her pen; a goodly income for a woman writer in her day--or in any day, for that matter. Among her novels were "Meredith," "Grace Cassidy," "The Governess," and "The Victims of Society." You have never read any of them, I think. If you tried to, as did I, they would bore you as they bored me. They have no literary quality; and their only value is in their truthful depiction of the social life of her times. She did magazine work, too, and wrote for such chaste publications as ~Friendship's Offering~, ~The Amulet~, ~Keepsakes~, and others of like mushiness of name and matter. Once more her salons were the talk of all England, and once more the best men crowded to them. But no longer did the best women frequent the Blessington receptions. The scandal that had been hushed by the sacrifice of the earl's daughter to a man who loved her stepmother had blazed up fresh when the D'Orsays went to live at Gore House with Marguerite. And women fought shy of the lovely widow.