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Georgina’s old friend Edward Maitland and Mrs. Anna Kingsford had come home from France, she to work in a medical practice in Kensington, he to write and study. They joined the Theosophical Society together and, disenchanted with that, founded in 1885 the Hermetic Society, more mystical than spiritualist and based on the teachings of Hermes Trismegistus. Georgina was never capable of such sustained abstract intellectual effort. Though she was vice-president of the Magna-Chartists, a reforming social movement founded by Kenealy, her interest in it was strictly limited to the publicizing of her own legal history. She was not a woman of ideas, as so many around her were becoming. She could not draw together all the threads of social reform, nor did she have the inclination. If she went out at night to address some meeting, it was always about herself, never about the broader issues. She read very little and was easily flummoxed by art—she got her information on that from back copies of the Athenaeum which her mother sent up from Hampshire whenever she could remember. She did chase money, but not in order to use it purposefully. For example, having learned that her mother had made a will, she tried to persuade Louisa to make her an early gift of her portion. (If Louisa was ambivalent about this, it was because she had no intention of giving Georgina more than the merest token.)

What Georgina wanted out of any social transaction was what she considered her moral due, and this she was not always able to identify with any precision. Nor was she prepared to get along with other people in what might be called a good-natured way, winning some, losing some. To lose was not to have your worth recognized. The law was a ready-to-hand substitute for real life, for the disobliging and unsatisfactory nature of day-to-day existence. With it she had won great battles, but even then she was not always vindicated as she wished. The most titanically absurd of her legal wrangles was beginning against her own lawyer in the Menier trial, St. John Wontner. She pursued him and his firm through the courts all the way down to 1901, when the evidence being disputed was a quarter century old. Her friends (like the faithful Salsbury) waited for her to move on, find new challenges. She never did. She was nobody’s lieutenant and followed no flag but her own.

In most lives, people live in a settled place. They give and receive hospitality and in this way build up a network of friends and confidants. They take pleasure in small things, like food and drink, or the best choice of curtain material, the progress of a particular shrub in the garden. They read. They follow the doings of the famous. The seasons of the year announce themselves by sunlight falling across a lawn or flooding a room that is otherwise dark. The passage of time is marked by the growth of children—their own or others. In other words, they are overwhelmed (or comforted) by sheer ordinariness. This never happened to Georgina. There is no evidence that—with one exception—she ever met her nephews and nieces. Hers is a story without Christmases. For nearly fifteen years she had not taken a vacation. All these benefits were enjoyed by the rest of the Trehernes, who might have been dull but were secure in the world of little things.

Her fiftieth birthday could not go on being celebrated forever. Angele was away from home, Georgina could not be completely certain where. She wrote the Frenchwoman an enormously long letter outlining all her faults, ending with an ultimatum. She should come home to Gower Street or be forever banished. It was imperious but it was the last of her mistakes. Angele did come home nine days later. She pointed out, with the sort of cold savagery that Georgina herself employed in the courts when the occasion demanded, that the house was in her name and that if her lover, now her former lover, did not leave it at once, she would go to solicitors, seek an order, and have her evicted.

Perhaps it came as a relief. Once, Mrs. Weldon would have rushed to the law herself and whatever the cost, however rocky the road ahead, found some way to drag Mme Menier through the courts. She had done it for everyone else who crossed her or betrayed her: why not Angele? It is an indication of what Angele meant to her that she did not. She accepted that it was over between them with a kind of exhausted grace. She conferred wearily with Harcourt (who offered to go to Bloomsbury and shoot the lady), wound up in the office in Red Lion Court, and arranged for her goods and chattels to go temporarily into storage. She wrote in her diary: “It quite breaks my heart to leave my garden, my window boxes, my little green room and everything. I hope I can keep the dogs and I must try to keep my darling monkeys. My little birds, too. How sad to leave them. I must take a few.”

There were more than two dozen budgerigars that could not make the journey with her. Her papers and correspondence filled twenty-seven tea chests, which were removed to storage as though her life had been lived in nothing but an office. It was a dramatically dry-eyed parting and, as always happened with her, once a thing had been decided, swift. She never saw Angele again.

On September 23, 1888, she went to Charing Cross and assembled on the platform her two pugs, the monkey Tittileelee, and several cages of birds. Her own luggage was modest by comparison. As she waited to board the train, she reflected it was the twenty-eighth anniversary of her miscarriage. It was also the death by exhaustion of the personality she had raised and nurtured in the baby’s place. Of that Georgina Weldon, there was nothing more to say. She wrote:

I’d given myself until my fiftieth year to get together the sum I would need to raise and educate 50 children; and as late as 1885 I thought every incident, every adventure would end for me in triumphant success. When 1887 and my fiftieth birthday arrived, something broke inside me. Since then, my powers have noticeably declined. I had never been robust. The doctors said there was nothing wrong with me, but I felt exhausted.

The whistle blew, the last door slammed, and like Gounod, with tears streaming down her face, she said good-bye to her past. A day later she presented herself at Gisors and was given a room on the second floor. She engaged a maid, calmed herself, put on the work uniform that the sisters wore (to their undying shock), inspected the garden; and then slowly, laboriously, began to compose the judicial memoirs on which this book is based.