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 flattered--you
must have music, dancing, and society--or you languish, you die
away. Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you
independent of all efforts, and all wills, but your own? Take one
day; share it into sections; to each section apportion its task:
leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour, ten minutes, five
minutes--include all; do each piece of business in its turn with
method, with rigid regularity. The day will close almost before you
are aware it has begun; and you are indebted to no one for helping
you to get rid of one vacant moment: you have had to seek no one's
company, conversation, sympathy, forbearance; you have lived, in
short, as an independent being ought to do. Take this advice: the
first and last I shall offer you; then you will not want me or any
one else, happen what may. Neglect it--go on as heretofore,
craving, whining, and idling--and suffer the results of your idiocy,
however bad and insuperable they may be. I tell you this plainly;
and listen: for though I shall no more repeat what I am now about
to say, I shall steadily act on it. After my mother's death, I wash
my hands of you: from the day her coffin is carried to the vault in
Gateshead Church, you and I will be as separate as if we had never
known each other. You need not think that because we chanced to be
born of the same parents, I shall suffer you to fasten me down by
even the feeblest claim: I can tell you this--if the whole human
race, ourselves excepted, were swept away, and we two stood alone on
the earth, I would leave you in the old world, and betake myself to
the new."