WALPOLE HOUSE 
The trio vanished indoors, but though I watched, nobody else 
came forth—never a Duchess of Cleveland, or a Daniel O’Connell, 
not even a sculptor who had wrought a great work, and made 
much use of the garden; nor the eminent actors who later trod 
that stage—not. one of these came into my day-dream. And this 
was not unnatural when one comes to think of it, because romance 
is more lasting than history—and while fiction of the first class will 
live for ever in the human mind, bald, unadorned facts are forgotten. 
‘The Castlemaine’? I am told, drew her last breath in a 
panelled upper room to the front; where two large windows face 
the Eyot, and another, set in the angle of the house, commands 
the whole length of the Mall, the lovely bend of the Thames towards 
Kew, and glorious views of the sunset. This may be so, but I am 
more interested to know that in a certain little attic in the roof, 
with a tiny window buried in greenery, had slept the dependent, 
Becky Sharp, one who was no better, but no worse, than the 
Duchess herself; and that the sweet face of the well-to-do pupil 
from Russell Square, had looked out upon the garden from yonder 
window to the left, on the first-floor back; the window that is 
nearest to the great sumach tree, in the corner next to Strawberry 
House. 
197 
