she informed me it was a covering for the altar of a new church lately erected near Gateshead.  Two hours she devoted to her diary; two to working by herself in the kitchen-garden; and one to the regulation of her accounts.  She seemed to want no company; no conversation.  I believe she was happy in her way:  this routine sufficed for her; and nothing annoyed her so much as the occurrence of any incident which forced her to vary its clockwork regularity.

She told me one evening, when more disposed to be communicative than usual, that John’s conduct, and the threatened ruin of the family, had been a source of profound affliction to her:  but she had now, she said, settled her mind, and formed her resolution.  Her own fortune she had taken care to secure; and when her mother died —­ and it was wholly improbable, she tranquilly remarked, that she should either recover or linger long —­ she would execute a long-cherished project:  seek a retirement where punctual habits would be permanently secured from disturbance, and place safe barriers between herself and a frivolous world.  I asked if Georgiana would accompany her.

“Of course not.  Georgiana and she had nothing in common:  they never had had.  She would not be burdened with her society for any consideration.  Georgiana should take her own course; and she, Eliza, would take hers.”

Georgiana, when not unburdening her heart to me, spent most of her time in lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness of the house, and wishing over and over again that her aunt Gibson would send her an invitation up to town.  “It would be so much better,” she said, “if she could only get out of the way for a month or two, till all was over.”  I did not ask what she meant by “all being over,” but I suppose she referred to the expected decease of her mother and the gloomy sequel of funeral rites.  Eliza generally took no more notice of her sister’s indolence and complaints than if no such murmuring, lounging object had been before her.  One day, however, as she put away her account-book and unfolded her embroidery, she suddenly took her up thus —

“Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you was certainly never allowed to cumber the earth.  You had no right to be born, for you make no use of life.  Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought, you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person’s strength:  if no one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy, useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable.  Then, too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or else the world is a dungeon:  you must be admired, you must be courted, you must be flattered —­ you must have music, dancing, and society —­ or you languish, you die away.  Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts, and all wills, but your