not excepting tailors. Here,
if they could know it, is their blessed comfort!

'Thank Harriet for her message. She need say nothing. By refusing me her
hospitality, when she must have known that the house was as free of
creditors as any foreigner under the rank of Count is of soap, she drove
me to Mr. Duflian. Oh! how I rejoice at her exceeding unkindness! How
warmly I forgive her the unsisterly--to say the least--vindictiveness of
her unaccountable conduct! Her sufferings will one day be terrible. Good
little Andrew supplies her place to me. Why do you refuse his easily
afforded bounty? No one need know of it. I tell you candidly, I take
double, and the small good punch of a body is only too delighted. But
then, I can be discreet.

'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
pe