Lawrence did not talk much while he took his sketch of me, and I remember very little that passed between him and my mother but what was purely personal.  I recollect he told me that I had a double row of eyelashes, which was an unusual peculiarity.  He expressed the most decided preference for satin over every other material for painting, expatiating rapturously on the soft, rich folds and infinitely varied lights and shadows which that texture afforded above all others.  He has dressed a great many of his female portraits in white satin.  He also once said that he had been haunted at one time with the desire to paint a blush, that most enchanting “incident” in the expression of a woman’s face, but, after being driven nearly wild with the ineffectual endeavor, had had to renounce it, never, of course, he said, achieving anything but a red face.  I remember the dreadful impression made upon me by a story he told my mother of Lady J——­ (George the Fourth’s Lady J——­), who, standing before her drawing-room looking-glass, and unaware that he was in the rooms, apostrophized her own reflection with this reflection:  “I swear it would be better to go to hell at once than live to grow old and ugly.”

Lawrence once said that we never dreamed of ourselves as younger than we were; that even if our dreams reproduce scenes and people and circumstances of our youth and childhood we were always represented, by our sleeping imagination, at our present age.  I presume he spoke of his own experience, and I cannot say that I recollect any instance in mine that contradicts this theory.  It seems curious, if it is true, that in the manifold freaks of our sleeping fancy self-consciousness should still exist to a sufficient degree to preserve unaltered one’s own conditions of age and physical appearance.  I wonder whether this is really the common experience of people’s dreams?  Frederick Maurice told me a circumstance in curious opposition to this theory of Lawrence’s.  A young woman whom he knew, of more than usual mental and moral endowments, married a man very much her inferior in mind and character, and appeared to him to deteriorate gradually but very perceptibly under his influence.  “As the husband is, the wife is,” etc.  Toward the middle of her life she told him that at one time she had carried on a double existence in her sleeping and waking hours, her dreams invariably taking her back to the home and period of her girlhood, and that she resumed this dream-life precisely where she left it off, night after night, for a considerable period of time,—­poor thing!—­perhaps as long as the roots of the young nobler self survived below the soil of a baser present existence.  This story seemed to me always very pathetic.  It must have been dismal to lose that dream life by degrees, as the real one ate more and more into her nature.