“You may have wit, good humour, and good nature, and not like me.  I allow a great deal for the inconstancy of mankind in general, and my own want of merit in particular.  But ’tis a breach, at least, of the two last, to deceive me.  I am sincere:  I shall be sorry if I am not now what pleases; but if I (as I could with joy) abandon all things to the care of pleasing you, I am then undone if I do not succeed.—­Be generous.”

It was about this time that she confided her troubles to Mrs. Hewet.  “At present, my domestic affairs go on so ill, I want spirits to look round,” she wrote.  “I have got a cold that disables my eyes and disorders me every other way.  Mr. Mason has ordered me blooding, to which I have submitted, after long contestation.  You see how stupid I am; I entertain you with discourses of physic, but I have the oddest jumble of disagreeable things in my head that ever plagued poor mortals; a great cold, a bad peace, people I love in disgrace, sore eyes, the horrid prospect of a civil war, and the thought of a filthy potion to take.  I believe nobody ever had such a melange before.”

The unsatisfactory situation, apparently, might have continued indefinitely, for, even if Montagu had been more pressing, Lady Mary, in spite of her independent attitude, was most reluctant, indeed, almost determined, not to marry without her father’s consent.

In the early summer of 1712, however, Lord Dorchester created a crisis.  Thinking, perhaps, that his daughter might one day get out of hand and, in despair, defy him, he decided to find her a husband other than Montagu.  At first, from a sense of weariness and from filial duty, Lady Mary inclined to obey the parental injunction—­to her father’s great delight.  All the preparations for the wedding were put in train—­then, ultimately, Lady Mary declared that she could not and would not go through with it on any terms.  Who the bridegroom was she does not mention, but, in a manner somewhat involved, she in a letter in July, 1912, confided the whole story to Montagu.

“I am going to write you a plain long letter.  What I have already told you is nothing but the truth.  I have no reason to believe I am going to be otherwise confined than by my duty; but I, that know my own mind, know that is enough to make me miserable.  I see all the misfortune of marrying where it is impossible to love; I am going to confess a weakness may perhaps add to your contempt of me.  I wanted courage to resist at first the will of my relations; but, as every day added to my fears, those, at last, grew strong enough to make me venture the disobliging them.  A harsh word damps my spirits to a degree of silencing all I have to say.  I knew the folly of my own temper, and took the method of writing to the disposer of me.  I said everything in this letter I thought proper to move him, and proffered, in atonement for not marrying whom he would, never to marry at all.  He did not think fit to answer this letter, but sent