Having thanked you very heartily and sincerely for this favour, I shall
just say a word or two in answer to yours. And so you really think you
have some morality on hand, a little stale or so but still sound, which
you can bestow with advantage upon me? You imagine you can tell me
something I never heard before? Now have you sincerely so much vanity,
Louisa? Be frank. You acknowledged I have crossed rivers, seas, and
mountains; but you are afraid I have shut my eyes all the time! _A loud
tongue and a prodigious luck of wit! Antics and impertinences of young
men of fashion!_ Really, my dear, you are choice in your phrases! You
could not love your brother _for any recital of the delight which
foreign ladies look in him, and which he took in foreign ladies!_ But
you could be in ecstatics for a brother of your own invention.

Do not suppose I am angry! No, no, my dear girl; I am got far above all
that! Though I cannot but laugh at this extraordinary brother, which
you are fashioning for yourself. If, when I come into your sublime
presence, I should by good luck happen to strike your fancy, why so! My
fortune will then be made! If not, sister, we must do as well as we
can. All in good time, and a God's name. Is not that tolerable
Worcestershire morality?

I am obliged to lay down my pen with laughing at the idea of Miss
Louisa's brother, supposing him to be exactly of her modelling. I think
I see him appear before her; she seated in state, on a chair raised on
four tressels and two old doors, like a strolling actress mimicking a
queen in a barn! He dressed in black; his hair smugly curled; his face
and his shoes shining; his white handkerchief in his right hand; a
prayer book, or the morals of Epictetus in his left; _not interlarding
his discourse with French or Italian phrases,_ but ready with a good