No similar blame is incurred by Henry Wilmers.  No blame whatever, one would say, if he had been less, copious, or not so subservient, in recording the lady’s utterances; for though the wit of a woman may be terse, quite spontaneous, as this lady’s assuredly was here and there, she is apt to spin it out of a museful mind, at her toilette, or by the lonely fire, and sometimes it is imitative; admirers should beware of holding it up to the withering glare of print:  she herself, quoting an obscure maximmonger, says of these lapidary sentences, that they have merely ‘the value of chalk-eggs, which lure the thinker to sit,’ and tempt the vacuous to strain for the like, one might add; besides flattering the world to imagine itself richer than it is in eggs that are golden.  Henry Wilmers notes a multitude of them.  ’The talk fell upon our being creatures of habit, and how far it was good:  She said:—­It is there that we see ourselves crutched between love grown old and indifference ageing to love.’  Critic ears not present at the conversation catch an echo of maxims and aphorisms overchannel, notwithstanding a feminine thrill in the irony of ‘ageing to love.’  The quotation ranks rather among the testimonies to her charm.

She is fresher when speaking of the war of the sexes.  For one sentence out of many, though we find it to be but the clever literary clothing of a common accusation:  ’Men may have rounded Seraglio Point:  they have not yet doubled Cape Turk.’

It is war, and on the male side, Ottoman war:  her experience reduced her to think so positively.  Her main personal experience was in the social class which is primitively venatorial still, canine under its polish.

She held a brief for her beloved Ireland.  She closes a discussion upon Irish agitation by saying rather neatly:  ’You have taught them it is English as well as common human nature to feel an interest in the dog that has bitten you.’

The dog periodically puts on madness to win attention; we gather then that England, in an angry tremour, tries him with water-gruel to prove him sane.

Of the Irish priest (and she was not of his retinue), when he was deemed a revolutionary, Henry Wilmers notes her saying:  ’Be in tune with him; he is in the key-note for harmony.  He is shepherd, doctor, nurse, comforter, anecdotist and fun-maker to his poor flock; and you wonder they see the burning gateway of their heaven in him?  Conciliate the priest.’

It has been partly done, done late, when the poor flock have found their doctoring and shepherding at other hands:  their ‘bulb-food and fiddle,’ that she petitioned for, to keep them from a complete shaving off their patch of bog and scrub soil, without any perception of the tremulous transatlantic magnification of the fiddle, and the splitting discord of its latest inspiriting jig.

And she will not have the consequences of the ’weariful old Irish duel between Honour and Hunger judged by bread and butter juries.’