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