Do you think I can be happy with Lord G——?

I am sure you may, if it be not your own fault.

That’s the thing:  I may, perhaps, bear with the man; but I cannot honour him.

Then don’t vow to honour him.  Don’t meet him at the altar.

Yet I must.  But I believe I think too much:  and consideration is no friend to wedlock.—­Would to Heaven that the same hour that my hand and Lord G——­’s were joined, yours and my brother’s were also united!

Ah, Miss Grandison!  If you love me, try to wean me; and not to encourage hopes of what never, never can be.

Dear creature!  You will be greater than Clementina, and that is greater than the greatest, if you can conquer a passion, that overturned her reason.

Do not, my Charlotte, make comparisons in which the conscience of your Harriet tells her she must be a sufferer.  There is no occasion for me to despise myself, in order to hold myself inferior to Clementina.

Well, you are a noble creature!—­But, the approaching Tuesday—­I cannot bear to think of it.

Dear Charlotte!

And dear Harriet too!—­But the officiousness, the assiduities, of this trifling man are disgustful to me.

You don’t hate him?—­

Hate him—­True—­I don’t hate him—­But I have been so much accustomed to treat him like a fool, that I can’t help thinking him one.  He should not have been so tame to such a spirit as mine.  He should have been angry when I played upon him.  I have got a knack of it, and shall never leave it off, that’s certain.

Then I hope he will be angry with you.  I hope that he will resent your ill-treatment of him.

Too late, too late to begin, Harriet.  I won’t take it of him now.  He has never let me see that his face can become two sorts of features.  The poor man can look sorrowful; that I know full well:  but I shall always laugh when he attempts to look angry.

You know better, Charlotte.  You may give him so much cause for anger, that you may make it habitual to him, and then would be glad to see him pleased.  Men have an hundred ways that women have not to divert themselves abroad, when they cannot be happy at home.  This I have heard observed by—­

By your grandmother, Harriet?  Good old lady!  In her reign it might be so; but you will find, that women now have as many ways to divert themselves abroad as the men.  Have you not observed this yourself in one of your letters to Lucy?  Ah! my dear! we can every hour of the twenty-four be up with our monarchs, if they are undutiful.

But Charlotte Grandison will not, cannot—­

Why that’s true, my dear—­But I shall not then be a Grandison.  Yet the man will have some security from my brother’s goodness.  He is not only good himself, but he makes every one related to him, either from fear or shame, good likewise.  But I think that when one week or fortnight is happily over, and my spirits are got up again from the depression into which this abominable hurry puts them, I could fall upon some inventions that would make every-one laugh, except the person who might take it into his head that he may be a sufferer by them:  and who can laugh, and be angry, in the same moment?