y to the love of pleasure, still dormant, and to the love of
conspicuousness, which became the two most noticeable features of her
character.

With all her natural advantages, however, the way was hard and long.
She had to become indispensable to Hamilton, and at the same time, and
by the same methods, an object the more desirable to him because of
her evident attractiveness to others. Above all, she had to contend
with her own temper, naturally lively and prone to bursts of anger,
which the prolonged suspense of the struggle, acting upon a woman's
nerves, tended peculiarly to exasperate. Hamilton was of an age when
he might be enslaved by fondness, but not constrained by strength of
passion to endure indefinitely household tempests, much less to
perpetuate them upon himself by lasting bonds. In all this Emma Hart
showed herself fully equal to the task. Tenderly affectionate to him,
except when carried away by the fits of irritability which both he and
Greville had occasion to observe, she complied readily with all his
wishes, and followed out with extraordinary assiduity his plans for
her improvement in education and in accomplishments. The society which
gathered round them was, of course, almost wholly of men, who one and
all prostrated themselves before her beauty and cleverness, with the
same unanimity of submission as did the officers of Nelson's division
after the Battle of the Nile. But, while giving free rein to coquetry,
and revelling in admiration, she afforded no ground for scandal to the
world, or dissatisfaction to Hamilton. In the attitude of outsiders
towards her, he had reason to see only the general testimony to her
charms and to his own good fortune. At the end of 1787 he wrote to
Greville: "I can assure you her behaviour is such as has acquired her
many sensible admirers, and we have a good man society, and all the
female nobility, with the queen at their head, show her every distant
civility."

Thus she persisted, keeping her beauty, and growing in mental
acquirements and accomplishments, but making little apparent headway
towards the great object of her ambition. "I fear," wrote Hamilton
towards the middle of 1789, when she had been three years with him,
"her views are beyond what I can bring myself to execute; and that
when her hopes on that point are over, she will make herself and me
unhappy. Hitherto her behaviour is irreproachable, but her temper, as
you must know, unequal." He underrated her