Adieu, my beloved Lady G——!  Repeated compliments, love, thanks, to my Lord and Lady L——­, to my Emily, to Dr. Bartlett, to Mr. Beauchamp, and particularly to my Lord G——.  Dear, dear Charlotte, be good!  Let me beseech you be good!  If you are not, you will have every one of my friends who met you at Dunstable, and, from their report, my grandmamma and Nancy, against you; for they find but one fault in my lord:  it is, that he seems too fond of a lady, who, by her archness of looks, and half-saucy turns upon him, even before them, evidently shewed—­Shall I say what?  But I stand up for you, my dear.  Your gratitude, your generosity, your honour, I say, (and why should I not add your duty?) will certainly make you one of the most obliging of wives, to the most affectionate of husbands.

My uncle says he hopes so:  but though he adores you for a friend, and the companion of a lively hour; yet he does not know but his dame Selby is still the woman whom a man should prefer for a wife:  and she, said he, is full as saucy as a wife need to be; though I think, Harriet, that she has not been the less dutiful of late for your absence.

Once more, adieu, my dear Lady G——­, and continue to love your

Harriet Byron.

LETTER XXXVII

Lady G——­, to miss Byron
Thursday, April 27.

Every one of the Dunstable party say, that you are a grateful and good girl.  Beauchamp can talk of nobody else of our sex:  I believe in my conscience he is in love with you.  I think all the unprovided-for young women, wherever you come, must hate you.  Was you never by surprise carried into the chamber of a friend labouring with the smallpox, in the infectious stage of it?—­O, but I think you once said you had had that distemper.  But your mind, Harriet, were your face to be ruined, would make you admirers.  The fellows who could think of preferring even such a face to such a heart, may be turned over to the class of insignificants.

Is not your aunt Selby, you ask, an excellent woman?—­She is.  I admire her.  But I am very angry with you for deferring to another time, acquainting me with what she said of me.  When we are taken with any body, we love they should be taken with us.  Teasing Harriet!  You know what an immoderate quantity of curiosity I have.  Never serve me so again!

I am in love with your cousin Lucy.  Were either Fenwick or Greville good enough—­But they are not.  I think she shall have Mr. Orme.  Nancy, you say, is such another good girl.  I don’t doubt it.  Is she not your cousin, and Lucy’s sister?  But I cannot undertake for every good girl who wants a husband.  I wish I had seen Lucy a fortnight ago:  then Nancy might have had Mr. Orme, and Lucy should have had Lord G——.  He admires her greatly.  And do you think that a man who at that time professed for me so much love and service, and all that, would have scrupled to oblige me, had I (as I easily should) proved to him, that he would have been a much happier man than he could hope to be with somebody else?