She did her best, however; for she was no prude, but a woman with a great heart, who had herself sought happiness in marriage, and failed to find it there, and had openly done things for which, if she had been an Englishwoman, Mrs. Grundy, instead of lionising, would have turned and rent her. She went further, and proposed to write to Lady Byron and try to arrange terms of peace; and Byron thanked her, and let her do so. Not, of course, that he had the least desire to return to Lady Byron's society. He was presently to thunder at her as his "moral Clytemnestra"; and Cordy Jeaffreson's suggestion that his irrepressible rhetoric was "only the superficial ferment covering the depths of his affection for her," and that "the woman at whom he railed so insanely was the woman who shared with his child the last tender emotions of his unruly heart" is as absurd a suggestion as ever a biographer put forth. Hobhouse has told us that Byron never was in love with Lady Byron; and, after what we have seen of Lady Byron's conduct and correspondence, it is hard to believe that any man would have been in love with her after living with her for a twelvemonth. Moreover, we know from "The Dream" where Byron's heart was at this time, as always, and we know from his own, as well as from Miss Clairmont's confessions, with how little regard for Lady Byron's feelings he was just then diverting himself in the Genevan suburbs; and we may fairly conclude that what he desired was not to return to her, but merely to be set right with the world by a nominal reconciliation, which would still leave him free to live apart from her. He did not get what he wanted, and Lady Byron was quite within her rights in withholding it. He had allowed himself to be manoeuvred into a false position, and had no claim upon her to help him to manoeuvre himself out of it; while she, on her part, was much too high principled to strain a point in favour of a returning prodigal--especially if, as is probable, information had reached her as to his proceedings in his exile. So she rejected his overtures in that cold, judicial, high-minded way of hers; and Byron did not repeat them, but made it clear that he had meant nothing by them, seeing that-- His reason is in "The Dream" which he wrote in July 1816. It was another of his bursts of candour, telling the world (and Lady Byron) yet again how he loved Mary Chaworth, and always had loved her, and always would, and how, even on his wedding day, the memory of her had come between him and his bride: