e whatever you direct. My
spirits have been hurried. I shall be better, I believe, before I am
worse. The care of my good friends here, looking at the women, shall not
meet with an ungrateful return.

The Doctor wrote. He would fain have declined his fee. As her malady,
he said, was rather to be relieved by the soothings of a friend, than by
the prescriptions of a physician, he should think himself greatly
honoured to be admitted rather to advise her in the one character, than
to prescribe to her in the other.

She answered, That she should be always glad to see so humane a man: that
his visits would keep her in charity with his sex: but that, where [sic]
she able to forget that he was her physician, she might be apt to abate
of the confidence in his skill, which might be necessary to effect the
amendment that was the end of his visits.

And when he urged her still further, which he did in a very polite
manner, and as passing by the door two or three times a day, she said she
should always have pleasure in considering him in the kind light he
offered himself to her: that that might be very generous in one person to
offer, which would be as ungenerous in another to accept: that indeed she
was not at present high in circumstance; and he saw by the tender, (which
he must accept of,) that she had greater respect to her own convenience
than to his merit, or than to the pleasure she should take in his visits.

We all withdrew together; and the Doctor and Mr. Goddard having a great
curiosity to know something more of her story, at the motion of the
latter we went into a neighbouring coffee-house, and I gave them, in
confidence, a brief relation of it; making all as light for you as I
could; and yet you'll suppose, that, in order to do but common justice
to the lady's character, heavy must be that light.

THREE O'CLOCK, AFTERNOON.

I just now called again at Smith's; and am told she is somewhat better;
which she attributed to the soothings of her Doctor. She expressed
herself highly pleased with both gentlemen; and said that their behaviour
to her was perfectly paternal.----

Paternal, poor lady!----never having been, till very lately, from under
her parents' wings, and now abandoned by all her friends, she is for
finding out something paternal and maternal in every one, (the latter
qualities in Mrs. Lovick and Mrs. Smith,) to supply to herself the father
and mother her dutiful heart pants after.

Mrs. Smith to