My good Lady V---- writes me word, that all our business is finished. The whole amount of our effects came but to three thousand four hundred pounds; our debts (including some charges which have occurred in the transacting of our affairs) exceeded eight thousand. Our worthy Lord V---- has paid the whole, and has made himself our only creditor. We have nothing now, that we can call our own, but my jointure. I do not reckon upon my mother's bounty to us; our income from her, and the house we live in, will be Sir George's, whenever it is our misfortune to lose her. But she tells me she is well, and talks of coming down in about a fortnight. _March 11_ I am here in a scene of still life, my dear; and you must now expect to hear of nothing but such trivial matters as used to be the subject of our journals when we were both girls, and you lived within a bow-shot of Sidney-Castle, and saw me every day. The last three months of my life have glided away like a smooth stream, when there is not a breath of wind to ruffle it; and after you read the transactions of one day, you know how I pass all the rest. I have told you of every-body that came to see me, and all the visits that I returned: I have given you an account of all our old acquaintance, and of some new ones. You know what my amusements are, and what my business. Indeed, what I call business, is my chief pleasure. You, who are surrounded by the gaieties of a splendid court, had need of the partiality which I know you have for your Sidney, to desire a continuation of her insipid narrative. But, I suppose, if I were to tell you, that, on such a day, my white Guiney-hen brought out a fine brood of chickens, you might be as well pleased with it, as I should be to hear from you of the birth of an arch-duchess. Indeed, my Cecilia, there is such a sameness in my now-tranquil days, that I believe I must have recourse to telling you my dreams, to furnish out matter of variety. _March 19_ We have had a wedding to-day in our neighbourhood. Young Main (Patty's brother) has got a very pretty young gentlewoman, with a fortune of five thousand pounds. It seems, this pair had been fond of each other from their childhood; but the girl's fortune put her above her lover's hopes; however, as he has, for a good while, been in very great business, and has the reputation of being better skilled in his profession than any one in the country, he was in hopes, that his character, his mistress's affection for him, and his own constancy, would have some little weight with her family. Accordingly he ventured to make his application to the young woman's brother, at whose disposal she was, her father having been dead for some years; but he was rejected with scorn, and forbid the house.