due, will be refused the honours they may justly claim?--I am very
much loth to offend you; yet I cannot help speaking of your relations,
as well as of others, as I think they deserve. Praise or dispraise,
is the reward or punishment which the world confers or inflicts on
merit or demerit; and, for my part, I neither can nor will confound
them in the application. I despise them all, but your mother: indeed
I do: and as for her--but I will spare the good lady for your sake--
and one argument, indeed, I think may be pleaded in her favour, in the
present contention--she who has for so many years, and with such
absolute resignation, borne what she has borne to the sacrifice of her
own will, may think it an easier task than another person can imagine
it, for her daughter to give up hers. But to think to whose
instigation all this is originally owing--God forgive me; but with
such usage I should have been with Lovelace before now! Yet remember,
my dear, that the step which would not be wondered at from such a
hasty-tempered creatures as me, would be inexcusable in such a
considerate person as you.

After your mother has been thus drawn in against her judgment, I am the
less surprised, that your aunt Hervey should go along with her; since
the two sisters never separate. I have inquired into the nature of the
obligation which Mr. Hervey's indifferent conduct in his affairs has laid
him under--it is only, it seems, that your brother has paid off for him a
mortgage upon one part of his estate, which the mortgagee was about to
foreclose; and taken it upon himself. A small favour (as he has ample
security in his hands) from kindred to kindred: but such a one, it is
plain, as has laid the whole family of the Herveys under obligation to
the ungenerous lender, who has treated him, and his aunt too (as Miss
Dolly Hervey has privately complained), with the less ceremony ever
since.