But that is another of the stories which throw at least as much light on the reporter as on the reported. Lord Sligo, no doubt, was the sort of healthy, wooden-headed young Philistine on whom it is a joy to test the effect of such remarks. Byron, in thus posing for him, was, so to say, "trying it on the dog." There is no such foolishness in his correspondence with those whom he regarded as his intellectual equals, and one cannot conclude the account of his travels better than by quoting his summary of their moral effect contained in a letter to Hodgson: "I hope you will find me an altered personage--I do not mean in body but in manner, for I begin to find out that nothing but virtue will do in this damned world. I am tolerably sick of vice, which I have tried in its agreeable varieties, and mean, on my return, to cut all my dissolute acquaintance, leave off wine and carnal company, and betake myself to politics and decorum." To what extent, and within what limits, he carried out these good resolutions, we shall observe as we proceed. CHAPTER IX RETURN TO ENGLAND--PUBLICATION OF "CHILDE HAROLD" July 1811 saw Byron back in England after two years' absence, but in no hurry, for various reasons, to return to Newstead. The "venerable pile" had been desecrated by the invasion of bailiffs in connection with an unpaid upholsterer's bill; and Mrs. Byron was living there, and was, as usual, quarrelling with her neighbours. Byron, in one of his letters from the Levant, tells her that she cannot deny that she is a "vixen," and suggests that she is in the habit of drinking more champagne than is good for her. It was only to be expected that she would rattle the fire-irons, and throw the tongs, as furiously as ever--even if a little less accurately--under the stimulating influence. He lingered, therefore, at Reddish's Hotel, Saint James's Street; and it was there that the news of her sudden illness--the result, it is said, of shock caused by the magnitude of the afore-mentioned upholsterer's bill--surprised him. He hurried to her, but the news of her death met him on his way. He had not loved her. We have passed many proofs of that, and many others could be given. She had taunted him with his deformity, and he believed--so he told Lord Sligo--that he owed it to her "false delicacy" at his birth. She had not understood him, and he had fled before her violence. Unable to love her, he had missed a precious emotion to which he felt himself entitled--that may be one of the secrets of his persistent view of himself as a lonely man, without a friend in a lonely world. If he was shaken by the sudden sundering of the tie, it would have been too much to expect him to be prostrated by his grief, or to do more than pay his brief tribute to the solemnity of death, remembering that there had been signs of tenderness in the midst of, or in the intervals between, the storms of passion.