In a letter of a later date, to the Dean, Lady Betty says:
‘Surely your Irish air is very bad for darts, if Miss Kelly’s are blunted already. Make her cross father let her come here, and we won’t use her so in England.’
Once more, May 1, 1733, Lady Betty, still writing to Swift, says:
‘I am extremely Miss Kelly’s humble servant, but I will never believe she is more valued for her beauty and good qualities in Ireland than she was in England.’
Then comes a bit of ill news concerning the Hibernian beauty:
‘I am heartily sorry for your new friend, Mrs. Kelly, who writes in a desponding way to Mrs. Chambers (Lady Betty Germain’s niece) about her health, and talks of going to Spa. This is a melancholy subject, and I hate to be vexed, so I will say no more of it.’
But she does say some more about it in a letter to the Dean from Knowle (or, as she spells it, Knole), July 9, 1733:
‘I hear poor Mrs. Kelly is not near so well as she says; and a gentleman that came from Bristol says she looks dreadfully, and fears that it is all over with her, and that no mortal could know her. So ends youth and beauty!’
And so exit the beautiful Miss Kelly, of whom I find no further traces at Hampstead or elsewhere. Her story, I think, may easily be traced in these few epistolary extracts: ‘That she belonged to the beau monde is evident, or she would not have been received into that “old courtiers’” set,’ as Mrs. Pendarves calls Lady Betty, whose name visitors to Knowle will be familiar with.[245]