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    will do all I can towards it, and I am sure you will not desire more. I think if the time would come over again, I would be differant. But it does not matter. There is nothing like bying expearance. I may be happyer for it hereafter, and I will think of the time coming and not of the past, except to make compar-rasons, to shew you what alterations there is for the best. . . . O Greville! think on me with kindness! Think on how many happy days weeks and years—I hope—we may yett pass. . . . And endead, did you but know how much I love you, you wou'd freely forgive me any passed quarrels. For I now suffer from them, and one line from you wou'd make me happy. . . . But how am I to make you amends? ... I will try, I will do my utmost; and I can only regrett that fortune will not put it in my power to make a return for all the kindness and goodness you have showed me."
    Conscious of growing gifts, she had chafed by fits and starts at the seclusion of her home—for home it was to her, in her own words, " though never so homely." On one occasion (noted by Pettigrew and John Romney too substantially to admit of its being fiction) Greville took her to Ranelagh, and was annoyed by her bursting into song before an applauding crowd. His displeasure so affected her that on her return she doffed her finery, donned the plainest attire, and, weeping, entreated him to retain her thus or be quit of her. This episode may well have been the source of Romney's picture " The Seamstress."
    The accounts omit any mention of amusements, and it must have been Greville alone who (rarely) treated her. She may have seen " Coxe's Museum," and the " balloonists " Lunardi and Sheldon, the Italian at the Pantheon, the Briton in Foley Gardens. She may

    have been present, too, when in the new " Marylebone Gardens " Signer Torre gave one of his firework displays of Mount Etna in eruption. If so, how odd must she afterwards have thought it, that her husband was to be the leading authority on Italian and Sicilian volcanoes! But what at once amazed Greville —the paragon of nil admirari —was the transformation that she seriously set herself to achieve. " She does not," observed this economist of ease three years later, " wish for much society, but to retain two or three creditable acquaintances in the neighbourhood she has avoided every appearance of giddiness, and prides herself on the neatness of her person and the good order of her house; these are habits," he comments, " both comfortable and convenient to me. She has vanity and likes admiration; but she connects it so much with her desire of appearing prudent, that she is more pleas'd zvith accidental admiration than that of crowds ^vhich now distress her. In short, this habit, of three or four years' acquiring, is not a caprice, but is easily to be continued. . . ." " She never has wished for an improper acquaintance," he adds a month later. " She has dropt everyone she thought I could except against, and those of her own choice have been in a line of prudence and plainness which, tho' I might have wished for, I could not have proposed to confine her [to]."
    Their visitors seem to have included his brother and future executor, Colonel the Honourable Robert Fulke-Greville, with perhaps, too, his kinsmen the Cathcarts; afterwards, the sedate Banks, a Mr. Tollemache, the Honourable Heneage Legge, whom we shall find meeting her just before her marriage, and oftener the artist Gavin Hamilton, Sir William's namesake and kinsman. He at once put Emma on his " list of favorites," reminding him, as she did, of a Roman beauty that he

    had once known, but superior to her, he said, in the lines of her beautiful and uncommon mouth. Her main recreation, besides her study to educate herself, were those continual visits to Romney, which indeed assisted it. His Diaries contain almost three hundred records of " Mrs. Hart's " sittings during these four years, most of them at an early hour, for Emma, except in