'The Duke and the Chancellor are besetting old Carrington in my favour,' he wrote. 'They say he must yield. I am not sanguine, but was recommended to issue the address. The Duke wrote a strong letter to the chairman of the election committee, saying if Wycombe was not ensured something else must be done for Disraeli, as a man of his acquirements and reputation must not be thrown away. L. showed me the letter, but it is impossible to say how things will go. It is impossible for anyone to be warmer than the Duke or Lyndhurst, and I ought to say the same of Chandos.' The Carrington family would not yield; Disraeli was defeated again, and it became clear that he must look elsewhere than to Wycombe. More than one seat might have been secured for him if he would have committed himself to a side, but he still insisted that if he entered Parliament he would enter it unfettered by pledges. There was an expected chance at Marylebone. When he proposed himself as a candidate he was asked on what he intended to stand. 'On my head,' he answered. Lyndhurst wished him to stand at Lynn as a friend of Lord Chandos. Lord Durham offered to return him as a Radical. 'He must be a mighty independent personage,' observed Charles Greville, when he persisted in the same reply. He realised by degrees that he was making himself impossible, but he would not yield without a further effort. There was curiosity about him, which he perhaps overrated, for he published a pamphlet as a self-advertisement, with the title 'What is He?' of the same ambitiously neutral tint. His object now was to make himself notorious, and the pamphlet, he said, 'was as much a favourite with the Tories as with the Rads.' [Sidenote: O'CONNELL AND THE WHIGS] In society he was everywhere, dining with Lyndhurst, dining with O'Connell, or at least invited to dine with him, at fêtes and water parties, at balls and suppers. D'Orsay painted his picture. The world would have spoilt him with vanity if his self-confidence had not been already so great that it would admit of no increase. His debts were growing. He had again borrowed for his election expenses. It was hinted to him that he might mend his fortune by marriage. 'Would you like Lady ---- for a sister-in-law?' he says in a letter to Miss Disraeli. 'Very clever, 25,000_l._, and domestic.' 'As for love,' he added, 'all my friends who married for love and beauty either beat their wives or live apart from them. This is literally the case. I may commit many follies in life, but I never intend to marry for love, which I am sure is a guarantee for infelicity.'