Noses, of course, are aristocratic things; and Lady Hester was the child of a great aristocracy.  But, in her case, the aristocratic impulse, which had carried her predecessors to glory, had less fortunate results.  There has always been a strong strain of extravagance in the governing families of England; from time to time they throw off some peculiarly ill-balanced member, who performs a strange meteoric course.  A century earlier, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was an illustrious example of this tendency:  that splendid comet, after filling half the heavens, vanished suddenly into desolation and darkness.  Lady Hester Stanhope’s spirit was still more uncommon; and she met with a most uncommon fate.

She was born in 1776, the eldest daughter of that extraordinary Earl Stanhope, Jacobin and inventor, who made the first steamboat and the first calculating machine, who defended the French Revolution in the House of Lords and erased the armorial bearings—­’damned aristocratical nonsense’—­from his carriages and his plate.  Her mother, Chatham’s daughter and the favourite sister of Pitt, died when she was four years old.  The second Lady Stanhope, a frigid woman of fashion, left her stepdaughters to the care of futile governesses, while ’Citizen Stanhope’ ruled the household from his laboratory with the violence of a tyrant.  It was not until Lady Hester was twenty-four that she escaped from the slavery of her father’s house, by going to live with her grandmother, Lady Chatham.  On Lady Chatham’s death, three years later, Pitt offered her his protection, and she remained with him until his death in 1806.

Her three years with Pitt, passed in the very centre of splendid power, were brilliant and exciting.  She flung herself impetuously into the movement and the passion of that vigorous society; she ruled her uncle’s household with high vivacity; she was liked and courted; if not beautiful, she was fascinating—­very tall, with a very fair and clear complexion, and dark-blue eyes, and a countenance of wonderful expressiveness.  Her talk, full of the trenchant nonchalance of those days, was both amusing and alarming:  ’My dear Hester, what are you saying?’ Pitt would call out to her from across the room.  She was devoted to her uncle, who warmly returned her affection.  She was devoted, too—­but in a more dangerous fashion—­to the intoxicating Antinous, Lord Granville Leveson Gower.  The reckless manner in which she carried on this love-affair was the first indication of something overstrained, something wild and unaccountable, in her temperament.  Lord Granville, after flirting with her outrageously, declared that he could never marry her, and went off on an embassy to St. Petersburg.  Her distraction was extreme:  she hinted that she would follow him to Russia; she threatened, and perhaps attempted, suicide; she went about telling everybody that he had jilted her.  She was taken ill, and then there were rumours of an accouchement, which, it was said, she took care to afficher, by appearing without rouge and fainting on the slightest provocation.  In the midst of these excursions and alarums there was a terrible and unexpected catastrophe.  Pitt died.  And Lady Hester suddenly found herself a dethroned princess, living in a small house in Montague Square on a pension of L1200 a year.