"Oh," Ann Eliza protested, "that ain't what I mean--and you
know it ain't. Only somehow the day we saw her I didn't think she
seemed like the kinder person you'd want for a friend."

"I guess a married woman's the best judge of such matters,"
Evelina replied, as though she already walked in the light of her
future state.

Ann Eliza, after that, kept her own counsel. She saw that
Evelina wanted her sympathy as little as her admonitions, and that
already she counted for nothing in her sister's scheme of life. To
Ann Eliza's idolatrous acceptance of the cruelties of fate this
exclusion seemed both natural and just; but it caused her the most
lively pain. She could not divest her love for Evelina of its
passionate motherliness; no breath of reason could lower it to the
cool temperature of sisterly affection.

She was then passing, as she thought, through the novitiate of
her pain; preparing, in a hundred experimental ways, for the
solitude awaiting her when Evelina left. It was true that it would
be a tempered loneliness. They would not be far apart. Evelina
would "run in" daily from the clock-maker's; they would doubtless
take supper with her on Sundays. But already Ann Eliza guessed
with what growing perfunctoriness her sister would fulfill
these obligations; she even foresaw the day when, to get news of
Evelina, she should have to lock the shop at nightfall and go
herself to Mr. Ramy's door. But on that contingency she would not
dwell. "They can come to me when they want to--they'll always find
me here," she simply said to herself.