There seems to have been all along, during my husband's life, an impression that he was always craving for Government honours, and complaining of neglect. This is absolutely untrue. He was too proud, too manly, too philosophic. He was profoundly silent on the subject. It was I who did it, I who asked, I who made interest, and left no stone unturned to get him advanced to his proper deserts, not from a mean vanity, nor selfish ambition, but because I saw all these long years, with deep pain, what all the world knows and acknowledges _now_, his true merits and great work; the true hero, abandoned and forgotten, so surely as Gordon was, silently eating his heart out by a foreign fireside, with a craving for England and his fellow-men as strong as Byron's. I alone am to blame, if blame there is; and in those days the Press backed me. What harm would it have done the Service, or the Foreign Office, to have given him his last four crippled years, with his pension? This reproach has been thrown in our teeth by successful people who ought to have had better taste. [Sidenote: _Miscellaneous Traits of Character and Opinions_.] As I said before, a man presents different characters to his wife, to _his_ family, to _her_ family, to his lover, to his men-friends, to his boon-companions, to the public. Now I have often, in the early days of my married life, watched with great interest and astonishment things that in after life I became quite used to. My husband, whose character naturally quite expanded with me in the privacy of our domestic life, became quite another man the moment anybody else entered the room. He was very natural with my immediate family, my father and mother, my brothers and sisters, and one or two of my uncles, so that they would describe him very much in the same terms that I do. With his own family he was, again, quite a different man, so that they saw him in another light. With the few friends--and you could count them on the fingers of one hand--with whom he chose to be _really_ intimate, he expanded to a certain amount; to all those he really liked he was a first-rate and staunch friend. With his boon-companions he was the centre of attraction. He would sit in the middle of them, and by his gaiety, brilliant conversation, and sound knowledge, fascinate the whole room, but to the world in general he seemed to wear a mask. He would throw out his quills like a porcupine, and somebody remarked they seemed to become harder every year.