affairs, and the importunity of creditors, who in the course of the last
half-year had served seven or eight executions on his house and furniture.
Their expectations were raised by exaggerated reports of his having
married money; and by a curious pertinacity of pride he still declined,
even when he had to sell his books, to accept advances from his publisher.
In January the storm which had been secretly gathering suddenly broke. On
the 15th, i.e. five weeks after her daughter's birth, Lady Byron left home
with the infant to pay a visit, as had been agreed, to her own family at
Kirkby Mallory in Leicestershire. On the way she despatched to her husband
a tenderly playful letter, which has been often quoted. Shortly afterwards
he was informed--first by her father, and then by herself--that she did
not intend ever to return to him. The accounts of their last interview, as
in the whole evidence bearing on the affair, not only differ but flatly
contradict one another. On behalf of Lord Byron it is asserted, that his
wife, infuriated by his offering some innocent hospitality on occasion of
bad weather to a respectable actress, Mrs. Mardyn, who had called on him
about Drury Lane business, rushed into the room exclaiming, "I leave you
for ever"--and did so. According to another story, Lady Byron, finding him
with a friend, and observing him to be annoyed at her entrance, said, "Am
I in your way, Byron?" whereupon he answered, "Damnably." Mrs. Leigh,
Hodgson, Moore, and others, did everything that mutual friends could do to
bring about the reconciliation for which Byron himself professed to be
eager, but in vain; and in vain the effort was renewed in later years. The
wife was inveterately bent on a separation, of the causes of which the
husband alleged he was never informed, and with regard to which as long as
he lived she preserved a rigid silence.

For some time after the event Byron spoke of his wife with at least
apparent generosity. Rightly or wrongly, he blamed her parents, and her
maid--Mrs. Clermont, the theme of his scathing but not always dignified