I dabbled a handkerchief in a neighbouring fountain for her to wash her streaked face, and eventually I got her to the top of the hill, where all the others had long since arrived.
The incident was entirely characteristic of her.

She was furiously angry with all things in heaven above and on the earth below because she was at the moment inconvenienced.
Here is the beginning of a letter from her of a date some months anterior to the Boboli adventure: "Illustrissimo Signor Tommaso" (that was the usual style of her address to me), "as your book is just out you must feel quite _en train_ for puffs of any description.

Therefore I send you the best I have seen for a long while, _La Physiologie du Fumeur_.

But even if you don't like it, _don't_ put it in your pipe and smoke it.

_Vide_ Joseph Fume." A little subsequently she writes: "Signor Tommaso, the only revenge I shall take for your lecture" (probably on the matter of some outrageous extravagance) "is not to call you _illustrissimo_ and not to send you an illuminated postillion" (a previous letter having been ornamented with such a decoration at the top of the sheet), "but let you find your way to Venice in the dark as you can, and then and there, 'On the Rialto I will rate you,' and, being a man, you know there is no chance of my _over-rating_ you." The following passage from the same letter refers to some negotiations with which she had entrusted me relative to some illustrations she was bent on having in a forthcoming book she was about to publish:--"As for the immortal Cruikshank, tell him that I am sure the mighty genius which conceived Lord Bateman could not refuse to give any lady the _werry best_, and if he does I shall pass the rest of my life registering a similar _wow_ to that of the fair Sophia, and exclaiming, 'I vish, George Cruikshank, as you vas mine.'" The rest of the long, closely-written four-paged letter is an indiscriminate and bitter, though joking attack, upon the race of publishers.