[_Mrs Arnold in continuation_]. _June 20_ Yes, my dear Cecilia, I have need of the tender condolements, with which your last packet was filled. Well may you call me a child of affliction; I am now so exercised in sorrows, that I look forward to nothing else. Patty, I find, has been a faithful journalist; and has carried down her melancholy narrative to this day: this day, on which, for the first time, I have taken a pen in my hand for more than two months; but my eyes are much better, and I hope I shall not have occasion for the assistance of her pen, unless some new calamity should again disqualify me from using my own. Yet in the midst of my griefs, ought I not to return thanks to heaven, that I have such an asylum to fly to, as the arms of one of the best of mothers? Oh! my dear, while I have her, I ought not to say, that I have lost every thing. Sir George has been more obliging since my fatal loss than he was before; but still there wants that cordial heart which he formerly had. As for his lady, I know very little of her. She came to see me twice since my arrival in town, in all the formal parade of a state visit. How ill does the vanity of pomp suit with a house of mourning! Her visits were short, formal, and cold. She seems to be intolerably proud, and I thought looked as if she was disgusted at visiting people in lodgings, who were so nearly related to her. My brother and she are to go down this summer into Scotland, to see a nobleman who is her uncle by her mother's side. She is ridiculously vain of her family, and has taught Sir George to be so too; so that now he hardly vouchsafes to own a relation that is untitled. _June 21_ Lady V----, whose friendship has been one of the chief resources of comfort to me, went out of town this morning. She is retired, for life I fear, to a distant part of Lancashire, in order to spend the rest of her days with her eldest sister, a widow lady, of whom she is very fond. Her son's ill behaviour has disgusted her so, she has broke with him intirely. Her younger son is gone into the army, not, I find, with her approbation: and she told me, she has nothing now worth living for, at least nothing for which she should subject herself to the cares of life. She insisted on my corresponding with her; and renewed her assurances of that kind attachment, which I have already so strongly experienced. At another time the loss of this dear woman's society would have affected me more sensibly; but I am so inured to disappointment and grief, that I am almost become a stoic.