respected reader and myself, that I was one of the handsomest
and most dashing young men of England in those days, and my wife was
violently in love with me; and though I say it who shouldn't, as the
phrase goes, my wife was not the only woman of rank in London who had a
favourable opinion of the humble Irish adventurer. What a riddle these
women are, I have often thought! I have seen the most elegant creatures
at St. James's grow wild for love of the coarsest and most vulgar of
men; the cleverest women passionately admire the most illiterate of
our sex, and so on. There is no end to the contrariety in the foolish
creatures; and though I don't mean to hint that _I_ am vulgar or
illiterate, as the persons mentioned above (I would cut the throat of
any man who dared to whisper a word against my birth or my breeding),
yet I have shown that Lady Lyndon had plenty of reason to dislike me
if she chose: but, like the rest of her silly sex, she was governed
by infatuation, not reason; and, up to the very last day of our being
together, would be reconciled to me, and fondle me, if I addressed her a
single kind word.

'Ah,' she would say, in these moments of tenderness--'Ah, REDMOND, if
you would always be so!' And in these fits of love she was the most easy
creature in the world to be persuaded, and would have signed away her
whole property, had it been possible. And, I must confess, it was
with very little attention on my part that I could bring her into
good-humour. To walk with her on the Mall, or at Ranelagh, to attend her
to church at St. James's, to purchase any little present or trinket for
her, was enough to coax her. Such is female inconsistency! The next
day she would be calling me 'Mr. Barry' probably, and be bemoaning her
miserable fate that she ever should have been united to such a monster.
So it was she was pleased to call one of the most brilliant men in His
Majesty's three kingdoms: and I warrant me OTHER ladies had a much more
flattering opinion of me.

Then she would threaten to leave me; but I had a hold of her in the
person of her son, of whom she was passionately fond: I don't know
why, for she had always neglected Bullingdon her older son, and never
bestowed a thought upon his health, his welfare, or his education.

It was our young boy, then, who formed the great bond of union between
me and her Ladyship; and there was no plan of ambition I could propose
in which she would not join for the poor lad's be