with herself once the passing excitement was over. From Dublin she wrote to Everina giving her a description of a masked ball to which she had gone, and of which she had evidently been a conspicuous feature:—
Dublin, March 14, 1788.
. . . I am very weak to-day, but I can account for it. The day before yesterday there was a masquerade; in the course of conversation some time before, I happened to wish to go to it. Lady K. offered me two tickets for myself and Miss Delane to accompany me. I refused them on account of the expense of dressing properly. She then, to obviate that objection, lent me a black domino. I was out of spirits, and thought of another excuse; but she proposed to take me and Betty Delane to the houses of several people of fashion who saw masks. We went to a great number, and were a tolerable, nay, a much-admired, group. Lady K. went in a domino with a smart cockade; Miss Moore dressed in the habit of one of the females of the new discovered islands; Betty D. as a forsaken shepherdess; and your sister Mary in a black domino. As it was taken for granted the stranger who had just arrived could not speak the language, I was to be her interpreter, which afforded me an ample field for satire. I happened to be very melancholy in the morning, as I am almost every morning, but at night my fever gives me false spirits; this night the lights, the novelty of the scene, and all things together contributed to make me more than half mad. I gave full scope to a satirical vein, and suppose. . . .
Unfortunately, the rest of the letter is lost.
In the midst of her duties and dissipations she managed to find some little time for more solid pleasures and more congenial work. In her letters she speaks of nothing with so much enthusiasm as of Rousseau, whose Emile she read while she was in Dublin. She wrote to Everina on the 24th of March:
