"The last two years" included, as we have seen, the period during which Byron was bombarding Hanson with perpetual and imperious demands for the ready money without which he could not go abroad with Lady Oxford--the period at which he told Moore that he was ready to "incorporate with any decent woman"--and the period at which he wrote "The Bride of Abydos" in order to "distract my thoughts from * * *" Miss Milbanke, that is to say, exaggerated both her importance to Byron and her influence over him, flattering herself that there would have been no "Byronism" but for her coldness, and that the warmth of her affection, so long withheld, was the one thing wanting to make glorious summer of the winter of Byron's discontent. It was not an unnatural hallucination. Young women of romantic disposition are easily flattered into such beliefs, especially if the gates are thronged with suitors. Having read of such situations in many novels, and dreamed of them in many dreams, they live in expectation of the day when life will be true to fiction and their dreams will be fulfilled. And sometimes, of course, the dreams are fulfilled--sometimes, but not very often, and hardly ever in the case of heroines who are, as Miss Milbanke was, commonplace in spite of their intelligence, cold, obstinate, unyielding, critical, vain, and inexperienced, quick to perceive slights, and slow to forgive them. At all events they were not, in her case, destined to be fulfilled; and the initial improbability of their fulfilment may be inferred from a confession which Hobhouse reports. "Lord Byron," Hobhouse writes, "frankly confessed to his companion that he was not in love with his intended bride; but at the same time he said that he felt for her that regard which he believed was the surest guarantee of matrimonial felicity." No more than that. Byron was only marrying, Hobhouse assures us, from "a love of change, and curiosity and a feeling of a sort of necessity of doing such a thing once." So that the engagement may be said to have been entered upon with a clash of conflicting expectations; and though tact might have saved the adventurers from shipwreck, tact was precisely the quality in which they were both most conspicuously deficient.