own?  Take one day; share it into sections; to each section apportion its task:  leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five minutes —­ include all; do each piece of business in its turn with method, with rigid regularity.  The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment:  you have had to seek no one’s company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance; you have lived, in short, as an independent being ought to do.  Take this advice:  the first and last I shall offer you; then you will not want me or any one else, happen what may.  Neglect it —­ go on as heretofore, craving, whining, and idling —­ and suffer the results of your idiocy, however bad and insuperable they may be.  I tell you this plainly; and listen:  for though I shall no more repeat what I am now about to say, I shall steadily act on it.  After my mother’s death, I wash my hands of you:  from the day her coffin is carried to the vault in Gateshead Church, you and I will be as separate as if we had never known each other.  You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim:  I can tell you this —­ if the whole human race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to the new.”

She closed her lips.

“You might have spared yourself the trouble of delivering that tirade,” answered Georgiana.  “Everybody knows you are the most selfish, heartless creature in existence:  and I know your spiteful hatred towards me:  I have had a specimen of it before in the trick you played me about Lord Edwin Vere:  you could not bear me to be raised above you, to have a title, to be received into circles where you dare not show your face, and so you acted the spy and informer, and ruined my prospects for ever.”  Georgiana took out her handkerchief and blew her nose for an hour afterwards; Eliza sat cold, impassable, and assiduously industrious.

True, generous feeling is made small account of by some, but here were two natures rendered, the one intolerably acrid, the other despicably savourless for the want of it.  Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.

It was a wet and windy afternoon:  Georgiana had fallen asleep on the sofa over the perusal of a novel; Eliza was gone to attend a saint’s-day service at the new church —­ for in matters of religion she was a rigid formalist:  no weather ever prevented the punctual discharge of what she considered her devotional duties; fair or foul, she went to church thrice every Sunday, and as often on week-days as there were prayers.