Lady Jean

The Douglas Family
actually next heir to her brother — while her children,
no matter who she married, would inherit through
her most of the Duke's estates and dignities. Here
was a simple remedy for her difficulties — yet for some
secret reason she would not marry. Could it be that
through some incapacity or illness she had found that
she could never have children ?
There is another heroine whom Lady Jean Douglas
will often bring- to our minds — who was of the same
o
type — whose wrongs were great, but whose cause was
weak — the celebrated Teresa Yelverton, an extra-
ordinary woman whom I knew, and indeed whose cause
I had advocated in print. She had been beguiled by a
lordly suitor into a sort of fictitious marriage. 1 There
was very much that was alike in the two ladies, par-
ticularly that self delusion which overpowers facts and
truths by feelings, and Mrs. Yelverton came at last
to believe firmly in all that she put forward.
After this escapade, and the death of her mother,
Lady Jean fixed herself at a place called Drumsheugh
House close to Edinburgh. Meanwhile the years had
been passing swiftly over her head, and she was near-
ing fifty. She was extravagant and fond of pleasure,
and described in one of the official papers of " the
Cause" as being "endowed with many extraordinary
qualities. The remarkable talents bestowed on her by
1 Charles Dickens, like all the world, was deeply interested in it,
and for him the author wrote for the All The Year Round a rather
vivid description of the scene of the trial, and which travelled round
the kingdom.
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