‘How will Lord M. be raptured when he sees her, and can salute her as his niece!
‘How will Lady Sarah bless herself!—She will now think her loss of the dear daughter she mourns for happily supplied!’
Miss Montague dwells upon every word that falls from her lips. She perfectly adores her new cousin—‘For her cousin she must be. And her cousin will she call her! She answers for equal admiration in her sister Patty.
‘Ay, cry I, (whispering loud enough for her to hear,) how will my cousin Patty’s dove’s eyes glisten and run over, on the very first interview!—So gracious, so noble, so unaffected a dear creature!’
‘What a happy family,’ chorus we all, ‘will our’s be!’
These and such like congratulatory admirations every hour repeated. Her modesty hurt by the ecstatic praises:—‘Her graces are too natural to herself for her to be proud of them: but she must be content to be punished for excellencies that cast a shade upon the most excellent!’
In short, we are here, as at Hampstead, all joy and rapture—all of us except my beloved; in whose sweet face, [her almost fainting reluctance to re-enter these doors not overcome,] reigns a kind of anxious serenity!—But how will even that be changed in a few hours!
Methinks I begin to pity the half-apprehensive beauty!—But avaunt, thou unseasonably-intruding pity! Thou hast more than once already well nigh undone me! And, adieu, reflection! Begone, consideration! and commiseration! I dismiss ye all, for at least a week to come!—But remembered her broken word! Her flight, when my fond soul was meditating mercy to her!—Be remembered her treatment of me in her letter on her escape to Hampstead! Her Hampstead virulence! What is it she ought not to expect from an unchained Beelzebub, and a plotting villain?
Be her preference of the single life to me also remembered!—That she despises me!—That she even refuses to be my WIFE!—A proud Lovelace to be denied a wife!—To be more proudly rejected by a daughter of the Harlowes!—The ladies of my own family, [she thinks them the ladies of my family,] supplicating in vain for her returning favour to their despised kinsman, and taking laws from her still prouder punctilio!
Be the execrations of her vixen friend likewise remembered, poured out upon me from her representations, and thereby made her own execrations!