’Now, do attend.  At once obtain a copy of Strike’s Company people.  You understand—­prospectuses.  Tell me instantly if the Captain Evremonde in it is Captain Lawson Evremonde.  Pump Strike.  Excuse vulgar words.  Whether he is not Lord Laxley’s half-brother.  Strike shall be of use to us.  Whether he is not mad.  Captain E——­’s address.  Oh! when I think of Strike—­brute! and poor beautiful uncomplaining Carry and her shoulder!  But let us indeed most fervently hope that his Grace may be balm to it.  We must not pray for vengeance.  It is sinful.  Providence will inflict that.  Always know that Providence is quite sure to.  It comforts exceedingly.

’Oh, that Strike were altogether in the past tense!  No knowing what the Duke might do—­a widower and completely subjugated.  It makes my bosom bound.  The man tempts me to the wickedest Frenchy ideas.  There!

We progress with dear venerable Mrs. Bonner.  Truly pious—­interested in your Louisa.  She dreads that my husband will try to convert me to his creed.  I can but weep and say—­never!

’I need not say I have my circle.  To hear this ridiculous boy Harry Jocelyn grunt under my nose when he has led me unsuspectingly away from company—­Harriet! dearest!  He thinks it a sigh!  But there is no time for laughing.

’My maxim in any house is—­never to despise the good opinion of the nonentities.  They are the majority.  I think they all look up to me.  But then of course you must fix that by seducing the stars.  My diplomatist praises my abilities—­Sir John Loring my style—­the rest follow and I do not withhold my smiles, and they are happy, and I should be but that for ungrateful Evan’s sake I sacrificed my peace by binding myself to a dreadful sort of half-story.  I know I did not quite say it.  It seems as if Sir A.’s ghost were going to haunt me.  And then I have the most dreadful fears that what I have done has disturbed him in the other world.  Can it be so?  It is not money or estates we took at all, dearest!  And these excellent young curates—­I almost wish it was Protestant to speak a word behind a board to them and imbibe comfort.  For after all it is nothing:  and a word even from this poor thin mopy Mr. Parsley might be relief to a poor soul in trouble.  Catholics tell you that what you do in a good cause is redeemable if not exactly right.  And you know the Catholic is the oldest Religion of the two.  I would listen to the Pope, staunch Protestant as I am, in preference to King Henry the Eighth.  Though, as a woman, I bear him no rancour, for his wives were—­fools, point blank.  No man was ever so manageable.  My diplomatist is getting liker and liker to him every day.  Leaner, of course, and does not habitually straddle.  Whiskers and morals, I mean.  We must be silent before our prudish sister.  Not a prude?  We talk diplomacy, dearest.  He complains of the exclusiveness of the port of Oporto, and would have strict alliance between Portugal and England, with mutual privileges.  I wish the alliance, and think it better to maintain the exclusiveness.  Very trifling; but what is life!