You are no flatterer, madam, and you have thought proper occasionally to express your approbation of my morals and mind.
Yet my expressions have never equalled my feelings!—Never!
Then, madam, where is the impossibility? In what does it consist? The world may think meanly of me, for the want of what I myself hold in contempt: but surely you cannot join in the world's injustice?
I cannot think meanly of you.
I have no titles. I am what pride calls nobody: the son of a man who came pennyless into the service of your family; in which to my infinite grief he has grown rich. I would rather starve than acquire opulence by the efforts of cunning, flattery, and avarice; and if I blush for any thing, relative to family, it is for that. I am either above or below the wish of being what is insolently called well born.
You confound, or rather you do not separate, two things which are very distinct; that which I think of you, and that which the world would think of me, were I to encourage hopes which you would have me indulge.
Your actions, madam, shew how much and how properly you disregard the world's opinion.
But I do not disregard the effects which that opinion may have, upon the happiness of my father, my family, myself, and my husband, if ever I should marry.
If truth and justice require it, madam, even all these ought to be disregarded.
Indubitably.