’Oh! the gentlemanliness of these infinitely maligned Jesuits!  They remind me immensely of Sir Charles Grandison, and those frontispiece pictures to the novels we read when girls—­I mean in manners and the ideas they impose—­not in dress or length of leg, of course.  The same winning softness; the same irresistible ascendancy over the female mind!  They require virtue for two, I assure you, and so I told Silva, who laughed.

’But the charms of confession, my dear!  I will talk of Evan first.  I have totally forgiven him.  Attache to the Naples embassy, sounds tol-lol.  In such a position I can rejoice to see him, for it permits me to acknowledge him.  I am not sure that, spiritually, Rose will be his most fitting helpmate.  However, it is done, and I did it, and there is no more to be said.  The behaviour of Lord Laxley in refusing to surrender a young lady who declared that her heart was with another, exceeds all I could have supposed.  One of the noble peers among his ancestors must have been a pig!  Oh! the Roman nobility!  Grace, refinement, intrigue, perfect comprehension of your ideas, wishes—­the meanest trifles!  Here you have every worldly charm, and all crowned by Religion!  This is my true delight.  I feel at last that whatsoever I do, I cannot go far wrong while I am within hail of my gentle priest.  I never could feel so before.

’The idea of Mr. Parsley proposing for the beautiful widow Strike!  It was indecent to do so so soon—­widowed under such circumstances!  But I dare say he was as disinterested as a Protestant curate ever can be.  Beauty is a good dowry to bring a poor, lean, worldly curate of your Church, and he knows that.  Your bishops and arches are quite susceptible to beautiful petitioners, and we know here how your livings and benefices are dispensed.  What do you intend to do?  Come to me; come to the bosom of the old and the only true Church, and I engage to marry you to a Roman prince the very next morning or two.  That is, if you have no ideas about prosecuting a certain enterprise which I should not abandon.  In that case, stay.  As Duchess of B., Mr. Duffian says you would be cordially welcome to his Holiness, who may see women.  That absurd report is all nonsense.  We do not kiss his toe, certainly, but we have privileges equally enviable.  Herbert is all charm.  I confess he is a little wearisome with his old ruins, and his Dante, the poet.  He is quite of my opinion, that Evan will never wash out the trade stain on him until he comes over to the Church of Rome.  I adjure you, Caroline, to lay this clearly before our dear brother.  In fact, while he continues a Protestant, to me he is a tailor.  But here Rose is the impediment.  I know her to be just one of those little dogged minds that are incapable of receiving new impressions.  Was it not evident in the way she stuck to Evan after I had once brought them together?  I am not at all astonished that Mr. Raikes should have married her maid.  It is a case of natural selection.