After dinner there was a universal discussion as to the possibility
and probability of Adorni's self-sacrifice in "The Maid of Honor,"
and as the female voices were unanimous in their verdict of its
truth and likelihood, I hold it to be likely and true, for Dante
says we have the "intellect of love," and Cherubino (a very
different kind of authority) says the same thing; and I suppose we
are better judges of such questions than men. The love of Adorni
seems to me, indeed, more like a woman's than a man's, but that
does not tell against its verisimilitude. Our love is characterized
generally by self-devotion and self-denial, but the qualities which
naturally belong to our affection were given to Adorni by his
social and conventional position. He was by birth and fortune
dependent on and inferior to Camiola, as women are by nature
dependent on and inferior to men; and so I think his love for her
has something of a feminine quality.

In the evening went with my mother to a party at old Lady Cork's.
We started for our assembly within a few minutes of Sunday morning.
Such rooms--such ovens! such boxes full of fine folks and foul air!
in which we stood and sat, and looked and listened, and talked
nonsense and heard it talked, and perspired and smothered and
suffocated. On our arrival, as I was going upstairs, I was nearly
squeezed flat against the wall by her potent grace, the Duchess of
St. Albans. We remained half an hour in the steaming atmosphere of
the drawing-rooms, and another half-hour in the freezing hall
before the carriage could be brought up; caught a dreadful cold and
came home; did not get to bed till two o'clock, with an intolerable
face-ache and tooth-ache, the well-earned reward of a well-spent
evening.

[The career of the Duchess of St. Albans was, as far as worldly
circumstances went, a curious one. As Miss Mellon she was one of my
mother's stage contemporaries; a kind-hearted, good-humored, buxom,
rather coarse actress, with good looks, and good spirits of a somewhat
unrefined sort, which were not without their admirers; among these the
old banker, Mr. Coutts, married her, and dying, left her the sole
possessor and disposer of his enormous wealth. My mother, who had always
remained on friendly though not intimate terms with her old stage-mate,
went to see her in the ear