Right after she married James, many of her old friends stopped talking to her. Why? For one, James is an actor, which isn't considered a respectable profession. Then, not long after they were married, one of James's old mistresses sued him. It was quite the scandal. Mary says that her "old friends either pitied [her] or cut [her] dead" (2.2.95 She spent years alone in cheap hotel rooms, waiting for James to get done carousing with his theatre buddies. She laments to Edmund, "If there was only […] some woman friend I could talk to – not about anything serious, simply laugh and gossip and forget for a while" (1.1.209). There's no such person in her life, though. She may turn to morphine to lessen the feeling of loneliness.