It
amuses themselves, and gives ease and familiarity to the social circle.
But while I have been reading, as has sometimes happened, a passage of
the highest sublimity, or most tender interest, I own I feel a little
indignant to see the shuttle plied with as eager assiduity as if the
Destinies themselves were weaving the thread. I have known a lady take
up the candlestick to search for her netting-pin, in the midst of Cato's
soliloquy; or stoop to pick up her scissors while Hamlet says to the
ghost, 'I'll go no further.' I remember another who would whisper across
the table to borrow thread while Lear has been raving in the storm, or
Macbeth starting at the spirit of Banquo; and make signs for a
thread-paper while cardinal Beaufort 'dies, and makes no sign.' Nay,
once I remember when I was with much agitation hurrying through the
gazette of the battle of Trafalgar, while I pronounced, almost agonized,
the last memorable words of the immortal Nelson, I heard one lady
whisper to another that she had broken her needle."

"It would be difficult to determine," replied I, "whether this
inattention most betrays want of sense, of feeling, or of good breeding.
The habit of attention should be carefully formed in early life, and
then the mere force of custom would teach these ill-bred women 'to
assume the virtue if they have it not.'"

The family at the Grove was, with us, an inexhaustible topic whenever we
met. I observed to Sir John, "that I had sometimes noticed in charitable
families a display, a bustle, a kind of animal restlessness, a sort of
mechanical _besoin_ to be charitably busy. That though they fulfilled
conscientiously one part of the apostolic injunction, that of 'giving,'
yet they failed in the other clause, that of doing it 'with simplicity.'"

"Yes," replied he, "I visit a charitable lady in town, who almost puts
me out of love with benevolence. Her own bounties form the entire
subject of her conversation. As soon as the breakfast is removed, the
table is regularly covered with plans, and proposals, and subscription
papers. This display conveniently performs the threefold office of
publishing her own charities, furnishing subjects of altercation, and
raising contributions on the visitor. Her narratives really cost me more
than my subscription. She is so full of debate, and detail, and
opposition; she makes you read so many papers of her own drawing up, and
so many answers to the schemes of other people, and sh