wife round the table with a dinner napkin, to wipe off the rouge that she would persist in daubing on her face.
Lady Coventry, though lovable in herself, did not meet with much affection from her husband. He soon wearied of her, and she consoled herself with numerous flirtations, and by the amusements of the card table. Quadrille was her favourite game; she used to play it for four hours a day, and often lost from twenty to thirty pounds at a sitting.
In 1757 she complained to the King that she could not walk in the park, because of the mob that surrounded her, so he ordered a guard to attend her. When she pretended to be frightened, the officer on guard ordered twelve sergeants to march abreast before her, and the sergeant and twelve men behind, "and in this pomp," adds a contemporary writer, "did this idiot walk all the evening with more mob about her than ever, her sensible husband on one side, and Lord Pembroke on the other."
In March, 1859, she was looking in great beauty at her sister's wedding. She showed George Selwyn her new dress for the Drawing-room, blue, with spots of silver the size of a shilling. She asked Selwyn how he liked it, and his answer was "Oh, you will be change for a guinea."
But her days for frivolity and admiration were fast drawing to a close. In August, 1760,
