But not to them alone. "Hours of Idleness," first published when he was a Cambridge undergraduate, is the idealised record of his school friendships; but it is also the idealised record of other, and very different, excursions into sentiment. It introduces us to Mary Duff, to Margaret Parker, to Mary Chaworth,--and also to some other Maries of less importance; and we will turn back and glance, in quick succession at their stories before following Byron to Cambridge. CHAPTER III A SCHOOLBOY'S LOVE AFFAIRS--MARY DUFF, MARGARET PARKER, AND MARY CHAWORTH First on the list of early loves comes little Mary Duff of Aberdeen. She was one of Byron's Scotch cousins, though a very distant one; and there is hardly anything else to be said, except that he was a child and she was a child in their kingdom by the sea. Only no wind blew out of a cloud chilling her. Her mother made a second marriage--described by Byron as a "faux pas" because it was socially disadvantageous--and left the city; and the two children never met again. It was of no importance, of course. They were only a little more than seven when they were separated. But Byron was proud of his precocity, and liked to recall it, and to wonder if any other lover had ever been equally precocious. "I have been thinking lately a good deal of Mary Duff," he wrote in a fragment of a diary at the age of twenty-five; and he reminded himself how he used to lie awake, picturing her, and how he urged his nurse to write her a love letter on his behalf, and how they sat together--"gravely making love in our way"--while Mary expressed pity for her younger sister Helen, for not having an admirer too. Above all, he reminded himself of the shock which he felt, years afterwards, when the sudden communication of a piece of news revived the recollection of the idyll. "My mother," he proceeded, "used always to rally me about this childish amour; and, at last, many years after, when I was sixteen, she told me, one day, 'Oh, Byron, I have had a letter from Edinburgh, from Miss Abercromby, and your old sweetheart Mary Duff is married to a Mr. C----.' And what was my answer? I really cannot explain or account for my feelings at that moment; but they nearly threw me into convulsions, and alarmed my mother so much that, after I grew better, she generally avoided the subject--to _me_--and contented herself with telling it to all her acquaintance." And then again: "My misery, my love for that girl were so violent that I sometimes doubt if I have ever been really attached since. Be that as it may, hearing of her marriage several years after was like a thunder stroke--it nearly choked me--to the horror of my mother and the astonishment and almost incredulity of nearly everybody."