'Then I am undone!' cried she, bursting into tears, and running back to her chamber.
Mrs. Arlbery instantly followed, and kindly inquired what disturbed her.
'O, Mrs. Arlbery!' she cried, 'lend me, I beseech you, some aid, and spare me, in pity, your raillery! Sir Sedley, I fear, greatly mistakes me; set him right, I conjure you....'
'Me, my dear? and do you think if some happy fatality is at work at this moment to force you to your good, I will come forth, like your evil genius, to counteract its operations?'
'I must write, then ... yet, in this haste, this confusion, I fear to involve rather than extricate myself!'
'Ay, write by all means; there is nothing so prettily forwards these affairs, as a correspondence between the parties undertaken to put an end to them.'
She went, laughing, out of the chamber, and Camilla, who had seized a pen, distressfully flung it from her.
What indeed could she say? he had made no direct declaration; she could give, therefore, no direct repulse; and though, through her brother's cruel want of all consideration, she was so deeply in his debt, she durst no longer promise its discharge; for the strange departure of Edgar robbed her of all courage to make to him her meditated application.
Yet to leave Sir Sedley in this errour was every way terrible. If, which still seemed very possible, from his manner and behaviour, he should check his partiality, and make the whole of what had passed end in mere public-place gallantry, she must always have the mortification to know he had considered her as ready to accept him: If, on the contrary, encouraging what he felt for her, from the belief she returned his best opinion, he should seriously demand her hand ... how could she justify the apparent attention she once paid him? and how assert, while so hopelessly his debtor, the independence to reject one who so many ways seemed to hold himself secure?