work regularity.
    She told me one evening, when more disposed to be communicative than usual,
that John's conduct, and the threatened ruin of the family, had been a source of
profound affliction to her: but she had now, she said, settled her mind, and
formed her resolution. Her own fortune she had taken care to secure; and when
her mother died, - and it was wholly improbable, she tranquilly remarked, that
she should either recover or linger long, - she would execute a long-cherished
project: seek a retirement where punctual habits would be permanently secured
from disturbance, and place safe barriers between herself and a frivolous world.
I asked if Georgiana would accompany her.
    »Of course not. Georgiana and she had nothing in common: they never had had.
She would not be burdened with her society for any consideration. Georgiana
should take her own course; and she, Eliza, would take hers.«
    Georgiana, when not unburdening her heart to me, spent most of her time in
lying on the sofa, fretting about the dulness of the house, and wishing over and
over again that her aunt Gibson would send her an invitation up to town. »It
would be so much better,« she said, »if she could only get out of the way for a
month or two, till all was over.« I did not ask what she meant by »all being
over,« but I suppose she referred to the expected decease of her mother, and the
gloomy sequel of funeral rites. Eliza generally took no more notice of her
sister's indolence and complaints than if no such murmuring, lounging object had
been before her. One day, however, as she put away her account-book, and
unfolded her embroidery, she suddenly took her up thus: -
    »Georgiana, a more vain and absurd animal than you, was certainly never
allowed to cumber the earth. You had no right to be born; for you make no use of
life. Instead of living for, in, and with yourself, as a reasonable being ought,
you seek only to fasten your feebleness on some other person's strength: if no
one can be found willing to burden her or himself with such a fat, weak, puffy,
useless thing, you cry out that you are ill-treated, neglected, miserable. Then,
too, existence for you must be a scene of continual change and excitement, or
else the world is a dungeon: you must be admired, you must be courted, you must
be
