Page:Lady Anne Granard 3.pdf/187

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LADY ANNE GRANARD.
185

if a gentleman is delicately circumstanced, not choosing to relieve the poor man, lest it was likely to be attributed to wrong motives, should not his lady help the poor man's wife, thus easing both parties? If you see occasion for this kind interference, and hesitate in using it, you must be an unfeeling woman, and an ungrateful wife."

Isabella departed, with a determination to be neither.

It was on the strength of this present, that Lady Anne sent for the milliner and silk-mercer, not foreseeing, as she said, that the Palmers were about to come over her for expences on Georgiana's account. When her writing-desk was opened, and she had placed her bills in their usual deposit, she opened that containing the poor Count's sovereigns, and began saying, "Whatever she spends, now, may, indeed must be, deducted from her wedding finery. (I should not wonder if that Mrs. Margaret, seeing her condition, gave her something very pretty)—three sovereigns will do for her pocket very handsomely. Two parties I will have, they are inevitable; and confectioners must be paid. I wonder what government will give that young man, for being half starved, and half drowned, and saving them a whole crew of scarecrows? Something handsome, surely, in which case he will have sympathy with a person so like himself, as I am (by