unanimous in their verdict of its truth and likelihood, I hold it to be likely and true, for Dante says we have the “intellect of love,” and Cherubino (a very different kind of authority) says the same thing; and I suppose we are better judges of such questions than men.  The love of Adorni seems to me, indeed, more like a woman’s than a man’s, but that does not tell against its verisimilitude.  Our love is characterized generally by self-devotion and self-denial, but the qualities which naturally belong to our affection were given to Adorni by his social and conventional position.  He was by birth and fortune dependent on and inferior to Camiola, as women are by nature dependent on and inferior to men; and so I think his love for her has something of a feminine quality.

In the evening went with my mother to a party at old Lady Cork’s.  We started for our assembly within a few minutes of Sunday morning.  Such rooms—­such ovens! such boxes full of fine folks and foul air! in which we stood and sat, and looked and listened, and talked nonsense and heard it talked, and perspired and smothered and suffocated.  On our arrival, as I was going upstairs, I was nearly squeezed flat against the wall by her potent grace, the Duchess of St. Albans.  We remained half an hour in the steaming atmosphere of the drawing-rooms, and another half-hour in the freezing hall before the carriage could be brought up; caught a dreadful cold and came home; did not get to bed till two o’clock, with an intolerable face-ache and tooth-ache, the well-earned reward of a well-spent evening.

[The career of the Duchess of St. Albans was, as far as worldly circumstances went, a curious one.  As Miss Mellon she was one of my mother’s stage contemporaries; a kind-hearted, good-humored, buxom, rather coarse actress, with good looks, and good spirits of a somewhat unrefined sort, which were not without their admirers; among these the old banker, Mr. Coutts, married her, and dying, left her the sole possessor and disposer of his enormous wealth.  My mother, who had always remained on friendly though not intimate terms with her old stage-mate, went to see her in the early days of her widowhood, when Mrs. Coutts gave her this moderate estimate of her “money matters:”  “Ah, I assure you, dear Mrs. Charles, the reports of what poor, dear Mr. Coutts has left me are very much exaggerated—­not, I really believe, more than a few hundred thousand pounds.  To be sure” (after a dejected pause), “there’s the bank—­they say about fifty thousand a year.”

This small fortune and inconsiderable income proved sufficient to the moderate desires of the young Duke of St. Albans, who married this destitute widow, who thenceforth took her place (and a large one) in the British aristocracy, and chaperoned the young Ladies Beauclerc, her husband’s sisters, in society.  She was a good-natured woman, and more than once endeavored to get my father and mother to bring me to her balls