'Consequently, the property of which I have possessed myself I am in either case determined to use every effort to keep. If I am suffered to keep it quietly, my present inclinations are what I have been describing. If contention must come, we must then have a trial of skill upon the opposite system.'

I listened to this discourse, attentive to every sentence, anxious for the next, and agitated by various contradictory emotions. I saw the difficulties of the supposed case; and knew not what to answer, or what to advise. That a man like this should become what he seemed half to promise was a thought that consoled and expanded the heart. But that it should depend upon so improbable an event as that of another renouncing a claim, which the law gave him, to property in dispute, was a most painful alternative. My sensations were of hope suddenly kindled, and as suddenly killed.

After waiting some time without any reply from me, he added 'Let us suppose, Mr. Trevor, a whimsical, or if you please a strange, coincidence between the man with whom you have been so angry and myself. I mean Wakefield. What if he felt some of the sober propensities toward which I find a kind of a call in myself?'

'He is not to be trusted. In him it would be artifice: or at least nobody would believe it could be any thing else.'

'Mark now what chance there is, in a world like this, for a man whom it has once deemed criminal to reform. Oppressed, insulted, and pursued by the good, what resource has he but to associate with the wicked?'

'He that, with the fairest seeming and the most specious pretences, affirming time after time that, though he had deceived before, he now was honest, he that shall yet again and again repeat his acts of infamy cannot complain, if no man should be willing to trust his happiness to such keeping.'

'I find what I am to expect from you. The very same will be said of me.'

'No: you have not been equally unprincipled, and vile.'

'These are coarse or at least harsh terms. However, I take them to myself; and affirm that I have.'

'How can you make such an affirmation? How do you know?'