hich she has accustomed herself to spend in the back parlour.
She allows herself to sit half an hour after breakfast, and an hour
after dinner; while I am talking or reading to her, she keeps her eye
upon her watch, and when the minute of departure comes, will leave an
argument unfinished, or the intrigue of a play unravelled. She once
called me to supper when I was watching an eclipse, and summoned me at
another time to bed when I was going to give directions at a fire.

Her conversation is so habitually cautious, that she never talks to me
but in general terms, as to one whom it is dangerous to trust. For
discriminations of character she has no names: all whom she mentions are
honest men and agreeable women. She smiles not by sensation, but by
practice. Her laughter is never excited but by a joke, and her notion of
a joke is not very delicate. The repetition of a good joke does not
weaken its effect; if she has laughed once, she will laugh again.

She is an enemy to nothing but ill-nature and pride; but she has
frequent reason to lament that they are so frequent in the world. All
who are not equally pleased with the good and the bad, with the elegant
and gross, with the witty and the dull, all who distinguish excellence
from defect, she considers as ill-natured; and she condemns as proud all
who repress impertinence or quell presumption, or expect respect from
any other eminence than that of fortune, to which she is always willing
to pay homage.

There are none whom she openly hates, for if once she suffers, or
believes herself to suffer, any contempt or insult, she never dismisses
it from her mind, but takes all opportunities to tell how easily she can
forgive. There are none whom she loves much better than others; for when
any of her acquaintance decline in the opinion of the world, she always
finds it inconvenient to visit them; her affection continues unaltered,
but it is impossible to be intimate with the whole town.

She daily exercises her benevolence by pitying every misfortune that
happens to every family within her circle of notice; she is in hourly
terrours lest one should catch cold in the rain, and another be frighted
by the high wind. Her charity she shows by lamenting that so many poor
wretches should languish in the streets, and by wondering what the great
can think on that they do so little good with such large estates.

Her house is elegant, and her table dainty, though she has little taste
of el