>>> That such designs he has had, if he still hold
them or not, I can have no doubt, now that I know
the house he has brought you to, to be a vile one.
This is a clue that has led me to account for all his
behaviour to you ever since you have been in his
hands.
Allow me a brief retrospection of it all.
We both know, that pride, revenge, and a delight
to tread in unbeaten paths, are principal ingredients
in the character of this finished libertine.
>>> He hates all your family—yourself excepted:
and I have several times thought, that I have seen
>>> him stung and mortified that love has obliged him
to kneel at your footstool, because you are a Har-
lowe. Yet is this wretch a savage in love.—Love
>>> that humanizes the fiercest spirits, has not been able
to subdue his. His pride, and the credit which a
>>> few plausible qualities, sprinkled among his odious
ones, have given him, have secured him too good
a reception from our eye-judging, our undistinguish-
ing, our self-flattering, our too-confiding sex, to
make assiduity and obsequiousness, and a conquest
of his unruly passions, any part of his study.
>>> He has some reason for his animosity to all the
men, and to one woman of your family. He has
always shown you, and his own family too, that he
>>> prefers his pride to his interest. He is a declared
marriage-hater; a notorious intriguer; full of his
inventions, and glorying in them: he never could
draw you into declarations of love; nor till your
>>> wise relations persecuted you as they did, to receive
his addresses as a lover. He knew that you pro-
fessedly disliked him for his immoralities; he could
not, therefore, justly blame you for the coldness
and indifference of your behaviour to him.
>>> The prevention of mischief was your first main
view in the correspondence he drew you into. He
ought not, then, to have wondered that you declared
your preference of the single life to any matrimonial
engagement. He knew that this was always your
>>> preference; and that before he tricked you away
so artfully. What was his conduct to you
afterwards, that you should of a sudden change
it?
Thus was your whole behaviour regular, con-
sistent, and dutiful to those to whom by birth you
owed duty; and neither prudish, coquettish, nor
tyrannical to him.
>>> He had agreed to go on with you upon those
your own terms, and to rely only on his own merits
and future reformation for your favour.
>>> It was plain to me, indeed, to whom you com-
municated all that you knew of your own heart,
though not all of it that I found out, that love had
pretty early gained footing in it. And this you
yourself would have discovered sooner than you
>>> did, had not his alarming, his unpolite, his rough
conduct, kept it under.
>>> I knew by experience that love is a fire that is
not to be played with without burning one's fingers:
I knew it to be a dangerous thing for two single
persons of different sexes to enter into familiarity
and correspondence with each other: Since, as to
the latter, must not a person be capable of premedi-
tated art, who can sit down to write, and not write
from the heart?—And a woman to write her heart
to a man practised in deceit, or even to a man of
some character, what advantage does it give him
over her?
>>> As this man's vanity had made him imagine, that
no woman could be proof against love, when his
address was honourable; no wonder that he
struggled, like a lion held in toils, against a passion
that he thought not returned. And how could
you, at first, show a return in love, to so fierce
a spirit, and who had seduced you away by vile
artifices, but to the approval of those artifices.
>>> Hence, perhaps, it is not difficult to believe, that
it became possible for such a wretch as this to give
way to his old prejudices against marriage; and to
that revenge which had always been a first passion
with him.
This is the only way, I think, to account for his
horrid views in bringing you to a vile house.
And now may not all the rest be naturally
accounted for?—His delays—his teasing ways—
his bringing you to bear with his lodging in the
same house—his making you pass to the people of
>>> it as his wife, though restrictively so, yet with hope,
no doubt, (vilest of villains as he is!) to take you
>>> at an advantage—his bringing you into the com-
pany of his libertine companions—the attempt of
imposing upon you that Miss Partington for a
bedfellow, very probably his own invention for
the worst of purposes—his terrifying you at many
different times—his obtruding himself upon you
when you went out to church; no doubt to prevent
your finding out what the people of the house were
—the advantages he made of your brother's foolish
project with Singleton.
See, my dear, how naturally all this follows from
>>> the discovery made by Miss Lardner. See how
the monster, whom I thought, and so often called,
>>> a fool, comes out to have been all the time one of
the greatest villains in the world!
But if this is so, what, [it would be asked by
an indifferent person,] has hitherto saved you?
Glorious creature!—What, morally speaking, but
your watchfulness! What but that, and the
majesty of your virtue; the native dignity, which,
in a situation so very difficult, (friendless, destitute,
passing for a wife, cast into the company of crea-
tures accustomed to betray and ruin innocent hearts,)
has hitherto enabled you to baffle, over-awe, and
confound, such a dangerous libertine as this; so
habitually remorseless, as you have observed him
to be; so very various in his temper, so inventive,
so seconded, so supported, so instigated, too pro-
bably, as he has been!—That native dignity, that
heroism, I will call it, which has, on all proper
occasions, exerted itself in its full lustre, unmingled
>>> with that charming obligingness and condescending
sweetness, which is evermore the softener of that
dignity, when your mind is free and unapprehen-
sive!
>>> Let me stop to admire, and to bless my beloved
friend, who, unhappily for herself, at an age so
tender, unacquainted as she was with the world, and
with the vile arts of libertines, having been called
upon to sustain the hardest and most shocking trials,
from persecuting relations on one hand, and from
a villanous lover on the other, has been enabled to
give such an illustrious example of fortitude and
prudence as never woman gave before her; and
who, as I have heretofore observed,* has made a
far greater figure in adversity, than she possibly
could have made, had all her shining qualities been
exerted in their full force and power, by the con-
>>> tinuance of that prosperous run of fortune which
attended her for eighteen years of life out of
nineteen.