However, Sister, as usual, was persuaded to take a great deal of the scrape on her shoulders, and Clarke, who seems clever enough, undertook to announce and explain the rest. Mr. R. was, I heard, horribly annoyed at first, but is resigned now, and it is all smothered up in her dressing-room where she has shut him up, and I do not know when he will be allowed to call himself well again.
I hear she is very low now the excitement is over, but wisely declares she shall do just the same next time, and he begs he may go as his own express. Poor man! he has a bad prospect before him, but I do not think that he minds it.
She professes the degree of religious feeling that is seldom met with, and which appears to me inconsistent with any worldly feelings whatever, above all with her feelings for _self_. The _quantity_ of her religion it is impossible to deny, but I doubt its _quality_ being right; and when I see that her high-flown mystical ideas end in making everybody round her perfectly miserable, I go back to the suspicions I have entertained for some time that the old simple religion we were taught at four years old out of Watt's catechism is the real right thing after all. "If you are good, you will go to Heaven, and if you are naughty, etc., etc." You ought to know your Watt's catechism. I shall learn mine over again, and begin quite fresh in the most practical manner.
Oh, by the bye, and another thing I have found out and meant to tell you is, that Virtue is _not_ its own reward. It may be anybody's else, but it is not its own. I take the liberty of asserting that my conduct here has been perfectly exemplary. I never behaved well before in my life, and I can safely add I never passed so unpleasant a month.
Well, my dear, good old George arrived to-night, which is payment for everything, and he has not blown his head off to signify.[240] There are no marks visible by candle-light, though he looks ill from starving. I have been very poorly myself with a cold caught by the open windows, and what it appears is called swelled glands. I never knew anything but a horse had that complaint or something like it, and that then they were shot; and as far as humanity goes that is a good cure. I went stamping and screeching about one day like an owl with the pain. If I get better we are going to Woburn, George says; but if I continue poorly I shall leave him there, and go home on Saturday. It is astonishing how kindly I feel towards Grosvenor Street. I am almost wishing to be settled there, for the first time in my life.