they were married on March 4th , 1880 , at St Matthias , Dublin , and the bride wore a simple travelling dress of grey . it was in every way more suitable , considering the bridegroom &apos;s age , and the fact that she was still in mourning for her brother . but she regretted it afterwards . the conventional dress of a widow has been mine , but never the dress of a bride . his letter to Layard from Paris , a few days later , gives the picture of a happy , teasing relationship between them . I am hardly recovered as yet from the surprise which my marriage has caused me . my wife , who was quite a student , is now plunged among chiffons and modistes , and I am bound to admit that she bears the infliction with a resignation which is rather alarming and ominous , excusing her new-fangled interest in dress on the grounds of pleasing me . evidently Cinderella got her finery after all . her welcome from the Layards was as warm as his had always been , and for Enid Layard , her ideal of a hostess and great lady , she felt a hero-worship which developed into the closest intimacy she ever had with another woman . to Lady Layard &apos;s literary antecedents I will return . they were only just in time to see Sir Henry in his ambassadorial glory , for his diplomatic career was coming to an abrupt end . a confidential despatch , in which he gave his frank opinion of the Sultan &apos;s incompetence and personal cowardice , was published by the foreign office , whether through carelessness or treachery is not known . Queen Victoria , a strong supporter of monarchical trade-unionism , was scarcely less furious than the Sultan , and Sir Henry was not only recalled , but lost his hope of a peerage , in which matter , one is told , Sir William had been acting as intermediary . however , the Layards were childless and comfortably off , and had some years previously bought themselves a beautiful palazzo on the Grand Canal in Venice , so that retirement was no great hardship to them . the Gregorys would visit them there every spring . to neither friend did retirement mean inactivity . they continued their work for the National Gallery and their personal picture-collecting , and Sir William continued to gratify what he calls his insatiable appetite for travelling . three times during his marriage he returned as a visitor to his beloved Ceylon , on the second occasion taking Augusta with him , and giving her a winter in India first . other winters were spent in Egypt ; spring in Spain or Italy , and then on to the Layards . he had , of course , no intention of burying himself at Coole ; it was a country house for a few weeks of shooting in the late summer and early autumn . nor did he take any notice of Dublin , a place of provincial dowdiness to a man of the world like himself , except to give a picture or two to its National Gallery - nothing in comparison with what he did for London &apos;s . the tall house in St George &apos;s Place , London , was the nearest thing he had to a settled home . for the Cinderella of Roxborough , it was liberation indeed . it was fulfilment not only as a woman , but as an intelligence . now at last she had someone to talk to ; in fact she had the best company in London to talk to , in the Jane Austen sense of the company of clever , well-informed people who have plenty of conversation . it was frequently the best company in the social sense too ; Sir William numbered at least two duchesses among his intimates . freed by my own happy marriage from many family traditions - so she describes her escape from the Persse conservatism and prejudice . Sir William may not appear much of a revolutionary from our standpoint , but from theirs he was almost as much a rebel and traitor to his class as she was to seem to the next ascendancy generation . moreover , he was a great gentleman , with a nation-wide reputation and the grand manner , and if he chose to be a rebel , nobody dared say him nay . in May of 1881 , their son William Robert was born in London , to be the pride of his father &apos;s old age , and to his mother the dearest thing on earth . 3 . as far as the Galway remove went , only seven miles separated her from Roxborough , but from the first , she says , there seemed to be a strangeness and romance about Coole . and it is not surprising , for the two houses and their demesnes were different worlds . Roxborough was open and windy , bustling and busy , a working estate ; Coole was a pleasure-house , a sleeping beauty palace in a thick forest . for by his plantations the east India chairman , homesick perhaps for Asia , had created an artificial jungle , quite against the grain of that limestone country . his descendants had inherited his passion for tree-planting . Sir William had turned the nut-wood north of the house into a pinetum , putting , as he cheerfully admits , a great deal of money into the nurserymen &apos;s pockets , since many of the rare species of conifer introduced would not take to the limestone , and died . but enough remained to create a handsome sub-Alpine gloom . the drive was two miles long , and the last mile was first an arching avenue of ilex , then a twisting forest track . the house itself disappointed many ( including , years later , Robert Gregory &apos;s artist bride ) by its architectural poverty . it was an oblong white Georgian building with a plain little porch , the counterpart of hundreds in Ireland . the principal living-rooms , library and drawing-room , looked the other way , west towards the lake , through undistinguished but serviceable bays . all the house &apos;s distinction lay within . four cultivated generations had filled it with books , pictures , statuary , records and mementoes of wide travel , all bearing the imprint of personal taste and personal achievement . it was the house of people who had never been afraid to use their brains . as at Roxborough , there were rats ; indeed , till Robert Gregory married , and his wife persuaded him to pull down the creeper which covered the outer walls , there were rats to a positively embarrassing degree . a visitor of the creeper epoch recalls a rat in her bedroom while she was undressing , a rat inside the mattress when she got into bed , and unmistakeable signs that a rat had been before her when she got down to breakfast next morning ; after which she walked the three miles into Gort , and sent herself a telegram , summoning herself home . ten minutes &apos; walk along the edge of the paddock at the back of the house brought one out - with a sense of relief if one were of a claustrophobic tendency - on to the edge of a long meandering lake , made even longer in winter by floods , since its waters , like those of the Roxborough river , only reached the sea by an underground channel , which was liable to get blocked . and round the lake lay more vast woods ; somewhere in their depths was a perched boulder which when struck emitted musical notes , and could be caused to ring like a chime of church bells . it was all very eerie , and not surprisingly , was a favourite haunt of the Sidhe , those strange beings , in appearance just like ordinary people until they vanished or filled your pockets with derisory gold , whom it is inadequate and misleading to describe by our English word of fairies . to the difficulty of finding your way about the woods was added their propensity for leading you astray , and unwary visitors could be lost for hours , or even a whole night . in later years their most notable victim was to be Bernard Shaw . even in County Galway , the seven miles &apos; removal meant a more intellectual society . Sir William &apos;s chief friend in the district was Count de Basterot , a French traveller and litt&amp;eacute;rateur who had inherited an estate on the Burren coast from the Irish side of his family , self-exiled to France in the time of James 2 . the Count came to Duras for the summer and autumn , much as the Gregorys came to Coole . while the next-door neighbour , at Tullira Castle , was an old-maidish young man named Edward Martyn , heir and hope of one of the rare catholic landed families . he had literary ambitions which Sir William had encouraged , and was in all directions talented , musically and artistically too . unfortunately , he was mother-dominated to an extent which made it impossible for him to manage his life or get the full value from his talents . to please his mother , he had Gothicised his house at a cost of &amp;pound;20,000 , though besought by Sir William not to . he would do anything to please her but marry , and he lived like a hermit in one of the towers , nourishing a hatred for the rest of womankind . his position as a wealthy and cultivated catholic later gave him great importance in the Irish renascence ; he became a link between the different sides of the movement ; people got to know each other through him , thereafter leaving him behind . three years after Lady Gregory &apos;s marriage , Dr ( later Monsignor ) Jerome Fahy was appointed Vicar-General of Gort , the market town nearest to Coole , and this brought into their circle another intelligent man whom as Augusta Persse she would never have been allowed to know . Sir William , it has been noted , was a friend to the Roman catholic religion , though perhaps not for what catholics would consider the right reasons . he had always been on good terms with the Bishop and clergy of the Kilmacduagh diocese , and their support had materially assisted his election as member for Galway . and the new Vicar-General was no ordinary parish priest , but a historian and a man of exceptionally enquiring mind . on the lonely moorland of Kilmacduagh , about three miles south-west of Gort , he found one of the most considerable groups of ancient ecclesiastical ruins in Ireland : an abbey church , a monastery , a cathedral , and a well-preserved round tower leaning two feet from the perpendicular . the history of these monuments had been nearly forgotten , but he made it his business to disinter the buried treasure , as he puts it in the preface to his history and antiquities of the diocese of Kilmacduagh , published in 1893 . he is writing , of course , from the standpoint of his faith , but much of what he disinterred was folklore , and he was collecting it in the field , a decade before Lady Gregory and Yeats . nor did he limit himself to legends of St Colman , but as we have seen , brought his story up to date with accounts of the reigning ascendancy families ; dealing out censure vigorously , but giving credit to those who had discharged their responsibilities fairly , particularly to the Gregorys and the Verekers , the two families who had made Gort such a well-liking and prosperous little town . 4 . the winter spent by the Gregorys in Egypt was an important one for Augusta , for it was then that , as she puts it , she made her education in politics . the leaders of the English colony in Cairo were the Sussex poet and landowner Wilfred Scawen Blunt , and his wife Lady Anne , granddaughter of Byron . Blunt was a great taker-up of causes . he was already disquieted by British administration in India , and a few years later , in the land league troubles , he was to claim the honour of being the first Englishman to go to gaol for Ireland &apos;s sake . he served a sentence in Galway Gaol for inciting Lord Clanricarde &apos;s tenants to resist eviction , and while this was no doubt awkward for Sir William Gregory , who was a friend of Lord Clanricarde &apos;s , it gave him in Lady Gregory &apos;s eyes the status of a hero . all her life she was fascinated by stories of prisons and prisoners , as indeed anyone with rebelly leanings well may be . from Blunt she learnt what it felt like to be inside the grim gaol at which she had so often stared in awe when her elders came to Galway , and which was to form the background to her two most famous short plays . 