It was the attitude in which women were regarded that affected their position more than the actual existence of repressive or deteriorating customs. And to public opinion the great lady was both more susceptible and more subject than other women, for she lived with all eyes upon her. Without a great deal of moral courage she could not step out of her bounds or revolt against the conditions of her life. A narrow mental horizon, a cramping education, united with wealth and high place, were not favourable to the evolution of women, morally or intellectually. In the eighteenth century women moved in a circle, from the meshes of which they were not freed until the present century had run half its course. With all the elaborate airs and dress which prevailed in the eighteenth century there was a coarseness of taste and behaviour which is in odd contrast to the exaggerated politeness affected by _beaux_ and _élégantes_. There seems a good foundation for Walpole’s description of the gaiety of the women as “an awkward jollity.” The diversions of the great ladies read strangely to our modern ears. What would be thought now of dukes and duchesses going about London with their friends in hired vehicles to see the sights? But in the spring of 1740, the Duke and Duchess of Portland organized a jaunt (as one of the party described it) to the City to see the City show-places. There were four ladies and four gentlemen, and they set out at ten o’clock in the morning in a couple of hackney coaches, made a comprehensive tour, and wound up by dining at a City tavern. “I never spent a more agreeable day,” writes one of the ladies of the party. The fashionable diversions, balls and routs, were repeated over and over again at every watering-place. “Pleasure with an English lady is a capital and rational affair. A party at Bath is perhaps the fruit of six months’ meditation and intrigue: she must feign sickness, gain over the servants, corrupt the physician, importune an aunt, deceive a husband, and in short have recourse to every artifice in order to succeed, and the business at last is to get fully paid for all the pains that have been taken. Pleasure is so much the more attractive to the English women as it is less familiar and costs them more to obtain. Melancholy persons feel joy more sensibly than those who are habituated to it.”[70]