LETTER XXX
MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE, TO MISS HOWE SUNDAY NIGHT, APRIL 16.
I may send to you, although you are forbid to write to me; may I not?—For that is not a correspondence (is it?) where letters are not answered.
I am strangely at a loss what to think of this man. He is a perfect Proteus. I can but write according to the shape he assumes at the time. Don't think me the changeable person, I beseech you, if in one letter I contradict what I wrote in another; nay, if I seem to contradict what I said in the same letter: for he is a perfect camelion; or rather more variable than the camelion; for that, it is said, cannot assume the red and the white; but this man can. And though black seems to be his natural colour, yet has he taken great pains to make me think him nothing but white.
But you shall judge of him as I proceed. Only, if I any where appear to you to be credulous, I beg you to set me right: for you are a stander-by, as you say in a former*—Would to Heaven I were not to play! for I think, after all, I am held to a desperate game.
* See Letter VIII. of this volume.
Before I could finish my last to you, he sent up twice more to beg admittance. I returned for answer, that I would see him at my own time: I would neither be invaded nor prescribed to.
Considering how we parted, and my delaying his audience, as he sometimes calls it, I expected him to be in no very good humour, when I admitted of his visit; and by what I wrote, you will conclude that I was not. Yet mine soon changed, when I saw his extreme humility at his entrance, and heard what he had to say.
I have a letter, Madam, said he, from Lady Betty Lawrance, and another from my cousin Charlotte. But of these more by-and-by. I came now to make my humble acknowledgement to you upon the arguments that passed between us so lately.
I was silent, wondering what he was driving at.