In a long library, lined alternately with splendidly bound books and
mirrors, and with a deep window of the breadth of the room opening upon
Hyde Park, I found Lady Blessington alone. The picture, to my eye, as
the door opened, was a very lovely one--a woman of remarkable beauty,
half buried in a fauteuil of yellow satin, reading by a magnificent
lamp suspended from the center of the arched ceiling. Sofas, couches,
ottomans, and busts, arranged in rather a crowded sumptuousness through
the room; enameled tables, covered with expensive and elegant trifles in
every corner, and a delicate white hand in relief on the back of a book,
to which the eye was attracted by the blaze of diamond rings.

All this "crowded sumptuousness" was due to the taste of Lady
Blessington. Amid it she received royal dukes, statesmen such as
Palmerston, Canning, Castlereagh, Russell, and Brougham, actors such
as Kemble and Matthews, artists such as Lawrence and Wilkie, and men of
letters such as Moore, Bulwer-Lytton, and the two Disraelis. To maintain
this sort of life Lord Blessington raised large amounts of money,
totaling about half a million pounds sterling, by mortgaging his
different estates and giving his promissory notes to money-lenders. Of
course, he did not spend this vast sum immediately. He might have lived
in comparative luxury upon his income; but he was a restless, eager,
improvident nobleman, and his extravagances were prompted by the urgings
of his wife.

In all this display, which Lady Blessington both stimulated and shared,
there is to be found a psychological basis. She was now verging upon the
thirties--a time which is a very critical period in a woman's emotional
life, if she has not already given herself over to love and been loved
in return. During Lady Blessington's earlier years she had suffered in
many ways, and it is probable that no thought of love had entered her
mind. She was only too glad if she could escape from the harshness
of her father and the cruelty of her first husband. Then came her
development into a beautiful woman, content for the time to be
languorously stagnant and to enjoy the rest and peace which had come to
her.

When she married Lord Blessington her love life had not yet commenced;
and, in fact, there could be no love life in such a marriage--a marriage
with a man much older than herself, scatter-brained, showy, and having
no intellectual gifts. So for a time she sought satisfaction in social