But a wife, while letting him be seen, would have insisted on appropriating the thought of him--all his days, past as well as present.
An impassioned sister's jealousy preferred that it should not be a wife reigning to dispute her share of her brother in imagination.
Then came a rumour, telling of him as engaged upon the composition of his Memoirs.
Lady Charlotte's impulsive outcry: "Writing them ?" signified her grounds for alarm.
Happily, Memoirs are not among the silly deeds done in a moment; they were somewhere ahead and over the hills: a band of brigands rather than a homely shining mansion, it was true; but distant; and a principal question shrieked to know whether he was composing them for publication.
She could look forward with a girl's pleasure to the perusal of them in manuscript, in a woody nook, in a fervour of partizanship, easily avoiding sight of errors, grammatical or moral.

She chafed at the possible printing and publishing of them.

That would be equivalent to an exhibition of him clean-stripped for a run across London--brilliant in himself, spotty in the offence.

Published Memoirs indicate the end of a man's activity, and that he acknowledges the end; and at a period of Lord Ormont's life when the denial of it should thunder.

They are his final chapter, making mummy of the grand figure they wrap in the printed stuff.