Indulgence of your own sorrows by repeating them and dwelling on
them to me, will only encourage and increase them, and that it
will be more prudent in you to avoid so sad a subject; but yet
knowing as I do what a soothing and melancholy Pleasure it must
afford you, I cannot prevail on myself to deny you so great an
Indulgence, and will only insist on your not expecting me to
encourage you in it, by my own letters; on the contrary I intend
to fill them with such lively Wit and enlivening Humour as shall
even provoke a smile in the sweet but sorrowfull countenance of
my Eloisa.

In the first place you are to learn that I have met your sisters
three freinds Lady Lesley and her Daughters, twice in Public
since I have been here. I know you will be impatient to hear my
opinion of the Beauty of three Ladies of whom you have heard so
much. Now, as you are too ill and too unhappy to be vain, I
think I may venture to inform you that I like none of their faces
so well as I do your own. Yet they are all handsome--Lady Lesley
indeed I have seen before; her Daughters I beleive would in
general be said to have a finer face than her Ladyship, and yet
what with the charms of a Blooming complexion, a little
Affectation and a great deal of small-talk, (in each of which she
is superior to the young Ladies) she will I dare say gain herself
as many admirers as the more regular features of Matilda, and
Margaret. I am sure you will agree with me in saying that they
can none of them be of a proper size for real Beauty, when you
know that two of them are taller and the other shorter than
ourselves. In spite of this Defect (or rather by reason of it)
there is something very noble and majestic in the figures of the
Miss Lesleys, and something agreably lively in the appearance of