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Emma never lost an opportunity to stress to Sir William how she loved him and longed for him to marry her. She emphasized that her sense of gratitude would make her an excellent wife and, as she put it, she would be the "horridest wretch in the world not to be exemplary towards him." In the hope of sprinkling rumor in the newspapers, she began to encourage gossip that they were secretly married (reports that reached the horrified ears of Sir William's family and friends). The English tourists who arrived in the winter of 1789 believed they were already married, and Sir William made no effort to stamp out the rumors, knowing that such illustrious guests would flinch from being entertained by a mere mistress. As he boasted, "many seek Emma's acquaintance, & we have the best company in Naples at our house. The Duchess of Argyle & that family doat upon Emma, & really she gains the heart of all who approach her." Sir William was so intent on promoting an intimacy with the new Spanish ambassador and his wife that he had implied to them he was married, enabling Emma to charm the stolid señora, gloating that "we are allways together." Feeling newly respectable because everyone believed her married, Emma reveled in her role of hostess. "Every night our house is open to small partys of fifty and sixty men & women. We have musick, tea etc, etc." She welcomed guests to "the first great assembly we had given pub-lickly," a ball for nearly four hundred, "all the foreign ministers & their wives, all the first ladies of fashion, foreyners & neapolitans, our house was full in every room. I had the Banti, the tenor Casacelli & 2 others to sing." The other ladies dripped with diamonds and brocade, but she was proudly resplendent in white satin, with her hair loose and unpowdered in the fashionable Grecian look she herself had popularized.

When his friends wrote demanding the truth, Sir William declared they were not married and never would be. His mistress, he told Greville, was "welcome to share with me, on our present footing, all I have during my life, but I fear her views are beyond what I can bring myself to execute; & that when her hopes on the point are over, that she will make herself & me unhappy, but all this entre nous, if ever a separation should be necessary for our mutual happiness, I would settle £150 a year on her, & £50 on her mother." He explained to his friend Joseph Banks that "I have no thoughts of relinquishing my Employment and whilst I am in a public character, I do not look upon myself at liberty to act as I please."1 Marrying her might affect his position at court. Moreover, as he wrote to Mary Dickenson, "of all Women in the World, the English are the most difficult to deal with abroad. I fear eternal tracasseries, was she to be placed above them here, & which must be the case, as a Minister's Wife, in every Country, takes place of every rank of Nobility." The problem was Emma's famous reputation: every visitor knew about Amy Lyon of the gossip columns, and Mrs. Hart, star of Romney's studio, and the queen of Attitudes.

Women, Sir William claimed to Banks, were "subject to great change according to circumstances and I do not like to try experiments at my time of life. In the way we live we give no Scandal, she with her Mother and I in my apartment, and we have a good Society. What is to be gained on my side?"2 Sir William told his friends what they wanted to hear—lying to Banks that Emma lived with her mother when in fact she was installed in his apartment. But the letters veer between declaring he would never marry and praising her excessively, emphasizing how she "really deserves everything and has gained the love of everybody" as well as "universal esteem." When he admitted that Emma "makes my house more comfortable," he inadvertently revealed the truth of the whole matter: he could not bear to lose her and pension her off in the country. As the year wore on, Sir William realized she was not going to settle for being his mistress much longer. He had a choice: