They were married on March 4th , 1880 , at St. Matthias , Dublin , and the bride wore a simple travelling dress of grey .sx It was in every way more suitable , considering the bridegroom's age , and the fact that she was still in mourning for her brother .sx But she regretted it afterwards .sx 'The conventional dress of a widow has been mine , but never the dress of a bride .sx ' His letter to Layard from Paris , a few days later , gives the picture of a happy , teasing relationship between them .sx 'I am hardly recovered as yet from the surprise which my marriage has caused me .sx 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 .sx ' Evidently Cinderella got her finery after all .sx 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 .sx To Lady Layard's literary antecedents I will return .sx They were only just in time to see Sir Henry in his ambassadorial glory , for his diplomatic career was coming to an abrupt end .sx A confidential despatch , in which he gave his frank opinion of the Sultan's incompetence and personal cowardice , was published by the Foreign Office , whether through carelessness or treachery is not known .sx 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 .sx 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 .sx The Gregorys would visit them there every spring .sx To neither friend did retirement mean inactivity .sx 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 .sx 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 .sx Other winters were spent in Egypt ; spring in Spain or Italy , and then on to the Layards .sx 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 .sx 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's .sx The tall house in St. George's Place , London , was the nearest thing he had to a settled home .sx For the Cinderella of Roxborough , it was liberation indeed .sx It was fulfilment not only as a woman , but as an intelligence .sx 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 .sx ' It was frequently the best company in the social sense too ; Sir William numbered at least two duchesses among his intimates .sx 'Freed by my own happy marriage from many family traditions'- so she describes her escape from the Persse conservatism and prejudice .sx 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 .sx 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 .sx In May of 1881 , their son William Robert was born in London , to be the pride of his father's old age , and to his mother the dearest thing on earth .sx .sx 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 .sx ' And it is not surprising , for the two houses and their demesnes were different worlds .sx Roxborough was open and windy , bustling and busy , a working estate ; Coole was a pleasure-house , a Sleeping Beauty palace in a thick forest .sx 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 .sx His descendants had inherited his passion for tree-planting .sx 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's pockets , since many of the rare species of conifer introduced would not take to the limestone , and died .sx But enough remained to create a handsome sub-Alpine gloom .sx The drive was two miles long , and the last mile was first an arching avenue of ilex , then a twisting forest track .sx The house itself disappointed many ( including , years later , Robert Gregory's artist bride ) by its architectural poverty .sx It was an oblong white Georgian building with a plain little porch , the counterpart of hundreds in Ireland .sx The principal living-rooms , library and drawing-room , looked the other way , west towards the lake , through undistinguished but serviceable bays .sx All the house's distinction lay within .sx 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 .sx It was the house of people who had never been afraid to use their brains .sx 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 .sx 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 .sx Ten minutes' 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 .sx 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 .sx 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 .sx 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 .sx In later years Their most notable victim was to be Bernard Shaw .sx Even in County Galway , the seven miles' removal meant a more intellectual society .sx Sir William's chief friend in the district was Count de Basterot , a French traveller and litte@2rateur 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 .sx The Count came to Duras for the summer and autumn , much as the Gregorys came to Coole .sx 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 .sx He had literary ambitions which Sir William had encouraged , and was in all directions talented , musically and artistically too .sx 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 .sx To please his mother , he had Gothicised his house at a cost of +20,000 , though besought by Sir William not to .sx 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 .sx 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 .sx Three years after Lady Gregory'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 .sx 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 .sx 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 .sx And the new Vicar-General was no ordinary parish priest , but a historian and a man of exceptionally enquiring mind .sx 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 :sx an abbey church , a monastery , a cathedral , and a well-preserved Round Tower leaning two feet from the perpendicular .sx 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 .sx 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 .sx 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 [SIC] and prosperous little town .sx .sx 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' .sx 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 .sx Blunt was a great taker-up of causes .sx 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's sake .sx He served a sentence in Galway Gaol for inciting Lord Clanricarde's tenants to resist eviction , and while this was no doubt awkward for Sir William Gregory , who was a friend of Lord Clanricarde's , it gave him in Lady Gregory's eyes the status of a hero .sx All her life she was fascinated by stories of prisons and prisoners , as indeed anyone with 'rebelly' leanings well may be .sx 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 .sx