Perhaps all rats do not leave a sinking ship; but, for very good reasons, one never hears anything further of the rats that don't. The rat that wishes to continue his career wastes no time in joining the exodus. And Emma Lyon did not disdain to take example from the humble rodent.
There seemed no good reason for remaining longer at the side of the bankrupt baronet, to add to his cares and expenses. So, with womanly consideration, she left him.
She was alone in the world once more, without a shilling or a friend; equipped with education, accomplishments, wondrous beauty, and charm, but with no immediate market for those commodities. It was the black hour that comes least once into the life of every adventuress.
And, in this time of need, she fell in with a beauty-culture quack, Graham by name.
Graham had devised a rejuvenation medicine—from Doctor Faustus down, the world has feverishly, piteously seized on every nostrum advertised as a means of exchanging age for youth—and he vowed that it would make its users not only young again, but maddeningly beautiful. As an example of "after using," Graham exhibited Emma Lyon, who, he said, had once been old and ugly, and who, by a course of his elixir, had become youthful and glorious. He called his medicine "Megalanthropogenesis." Women who heard his lecture took one look at Emma and then bought out Graham's ready supply of the stuff. The charlatan was an artist in gaining his effects, as witness a report of the exhibition in which Emma posed:
He had contrived a "Bed of Apollo," or "Celestial Bed," on which, in a delicately colored light, this exquisitely beautiful woman, nearly naked, was gradually unveiled, to soft, soft music, as Hygeia, goddess of health.
Presumably no effort was made by any eighteenth-century Comstock to suppress this show, and all London flocked and thronged and jostled to behold it. Apart from the normal crowd of idlers, came painters and sculptors to gaze in delight on the perfect face and form revealed through the shimmer of rose-colored light.
And foremost of these artists was a freakish genius toward whom was slowly creeping the insanity that a few years later was to claim him, and whose stealthy approach he was even then watching with horror. He was George Romney, who, with Sir Joshua Reynolds, divided the homage of England's art world. Romney had come to stare at Emma. He remained to worship. He engaged her as his model, and, soon or late, painted no less than thirty-nine pictures of her.
"I call her 'The Divine Lady,'" he once wrote. "For I think she is superior to all womankind."
The black hour was past. Emma Lyon's fortune and fame were secure. Thanks to Romney, she was the best-advertised beauty on earth. Conquests came thick and fast, not treading on one another's heels, but racing abreast.