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music , dancing , and society -- or you languish , you die away . Have you no sense to devise a system which will make you independent of all efforts , and all wills , but your own ? Take one day ; share it into sections ; to each section apportion its task : leave no stray unemployed quarters of an hour , ten minutes , five minutes -- include all ; do each piece of business in its turn with method , with rigid regularity . The day will close almost before you are aware it has begun ; and you are indebted to no one for helping you to get rid of one vacant moment : you have had to seek no one ' s company , conversation , sympathy , forbearance ; you have lived , in short , as an independent being ought to do . Take this advice : the first and last I shall offer you ; then you will not want me or any one else , happen what may . Neglect it -- go on as heretofore , craving , whining , and idling -- and suffer the results of your idiocy , however bad and insuperable they may be . I tell you this plainly ; and listen : for though I shall no more repeat what I am now about to say , I shall steadily act on it . After my mother ' s death , I wash my hands of you : from the day her coffin is carried to the vault in Gateshead Church , you and I will be as separate as if we had never known each other . You need not think that because we chanced to be born of the same parents , I shall suffer you to fasten me down by even the feeblest claim : I can tell you this -- if the whole human race , ourselves excepted , were swept away , and we two stood alone on the earth , I would leave you in the old world , and betake myself to the new ."
She closed her lips .
" You might have spared yourself the trouble of delivering that tirade ," answered Georgiana . " Everybody knows you are the most selfish , heartless creature in existence : and I know your spiteful hatred towards me : I have had a specimen of it before in the trick you played me about Lord Edwin Vere : you could not bear me to be raised above you , to have a title , to be received into circles where you dare not show your face , and so you acted the spy and informer , and ruined my prospects for ever ." Georgiana took out her handkerchief and blew her nose for an hour afterwards ; Eliza sat cold , impassable , and assiduously industrious .