MRS. JOHNSON TO LADY SUSAN
Edward Street.
I am gratified by your reference, and this is my advice: that you come
to town yourself, without loss of time, but that you leave Frederica
behind. It would surely be much more to the purpose to get yourself well
established by marrying Mr. De Courcy, than to irritate him and the rest of
his family by making her marry Sir James. You should think more of yourself
and less of your daughter. She is not of a disposition to do you credit in
the world, and seems precisely in her proper place at Churchhill, with the
Vernons. But you are fitted for society, and it is shameful to have you
exiled from it. Leave Frederica, therefore, to punish herself for the
plague she has given you, by indulging that romantic tender-‐heartedness
which will always ensure her misery enough, and come to London as soon as
you can. I have another reason for urging this: Mainwaring came to town
last week, and has contrived, in spite of Mr. Johnson, to make
opportunities of seeing me. He is absolutely miserable about you, and
jealous to such a degree of De Courcy that it would be highly unadvisable
for them to meet at present. And yet, if you do not allow him to see you
here, I cannot answer for his not committing some great imprudence-‐-‐such as
going to Churchhill, for instance, which would be dreadful! Besides, if you
take my advice, and resolve to marry De Courcy, it will be indispensably
necessary to you to get Mainwaring out of the way; and you only can have
influence enough to send him back to his wife. I have still another motive
for your coming: Mr. Johnson leaves London next Tuesday; he is going for
his health to Bath, where, if the waters are favourable to his constitution
and my wishes, he will be laid up with the gout many weeks. During his
absence we shall be able to chuse our own society, and to have true
enjoyment. I would ask you to Edward Street, but that once he forced from
me a kind of promise never to invite you to my house; nothing but my being
in the utmost distress for money should have extorted it from me. I can get
you, however, a nice drawing-‐room apartment in Upper Seymour Street, and we
may be always together there or here; for I consider my promise to Mr.
Johnson as comprehending only (at least in his absence) your not sleeping
in the house. Poor Mainwaring gives me such histories of his wife's
jealousy. Silly woman to expect constancy from so charming a man! but she
always was silly-‐-‐intolerably so in marrying him at all, she the heiress of
a large fortune and he without a shilling: one title, I know, she might
have had, besides baronets. Her folly in forming the connection was so
great that, though Mr. Johnson was her guardian, and I do not in general
share HIS feelings, I never can forgive her.
Adieu. Yours ever,
ALICIA.