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Clara Lucas Balfour
Published by Good Press, 2020
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She was naturally much sought after, even though her severe studies and varied attainments were so little understood as to be regarded rather as an eccentricity, merely to be treated with indulgence, as the strange caprice of a lovely girl left much to herself, and allowed to employ her leisure in her own peculiar way.
Mr. Samuel Greig, a connection of her mother's family, and Commissioner of the Russian Navy and Russian Consul for Britain, paid a visit to Admiral and Mrs. Fairfax, which ended in his proposing for the hand of their daughter, and being accepted. Miss Fairfax was then in her twenty-fourth year, and the preparations for her marriage were made on a scale of economy very unusual in her rank in these extravagant days. She says, "Fortune I had none, and my mother could only afford to give me a very moderate trousseau, consisting chiefly of fine personal and household linen. When I was going away, she gave me twenty pounds to buy a shawl or something warm for the winter. I knew that Sir Arthur Shee, of the Academy of Paintings, had painted a portrait of my father immediately after the battle of Camperdown, and I went to see it. The likeness pleased me; the price was twenty pounds; so, instead of a warm shawl, I bought my father's picture."
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