On the following morning Lords Northington, Lyttelton, and Colonel
Ayscough made their visits of ceremony. Mr. Robinson was not at home,
but I received them, though not without some embarrassment. I was yet a
child, and wholly unacquainted with the manners of the world; yet, young
as I was, I became the traveller of its mazy and perilous paths. At an
age when girls are generally at school, or indeed scarcely emancipated
from the nursery, I was presented in society as a wife--and very nearly
as a mother.

Lord Lyttelton, who was perhaps the most accomplished libertine that any
age or country has produced, with considerable artifice inquired after
Mr. Robinson, professed his earnest desire to cultivate his
acquaintance, and, on the following day, sent him a card of invitation.
Lyttelton was an adept in the artifices of fashionable intrigue. He
plainly perceived that both Mr. Robinson and myself were uninitiated in
its mysteries; he knew that to undermine a wife's honour he must become
master of the husband's confidence, and Mr. Robinson was too much
pleased with the society of a man whose wit was only equalled by his
profligacy, to shrink from such an association.

Fortunately for me, Lord Lyttelton was uniformly my aversion. His
manners were overbearingly insolent, his language licentious, and his
person slovenly even to a degree that was disgusting. Mr. Robinson was
in every respect the very reverse of his companion: he was unassuming,
neat, and delicate in his conversation. I had not a wish to descend from
the propriety of wedded life, and I abhorred, decidedly abhorred, the
acquaintance with Lord Lyttelton.

In the course of a few days his lordship presented me the works of Miss
Aitken[14] (now Mrs. Barbauld). I read them with rapture. I thought them