which left me not an hour to
lose. I should myself have shrunk from any thing so hasty, and she
would have felt every scruple of mine with multiplied strength and
refinement.--But I had no choice. The hasty engagement she had entered
into with that woman--Here, my dear madam, I was obliged to leave off
abruptly, to recollect and compose myself.--I have been walking over
the country, and am now, I hope, rational enough to make the rest of
my letter what it ought to be.--It is, in fact, a most mortifying
retrospect for me. I behaved shamefully. And here I can admit, that
my manners to Miss W., in being unpleasant to Miss F., were highly
blameable. _She_ disapproved them, which ought to have been enough.--My
plea of concealing the truth she did not think sufficient.--She was
displeased; I thought unreasonably so: I thought her, on a thousand
occasions, unnecessarily scrupulous and cautious: I thought her even
cold. But she was always right. If I had followed her judgment, and
subdued my spirits to the level of what she deemed proper, I should have
escaped the greatest unhappiness I have ever known.--We quarrelled.--
Do you remember the morning spent at Donwell?--_There_ every little
dissatisfaction that had occurred before came to a crisis. I was late;
I met her walking home by herself, and wanted to walk with her, but she
would not suffer it. She absolutely refused to allow me, which I then
thought most unreasonable. Now, however, I see nothing in it but a very
natural and consistent degree of discretion. While I, to blind the
world to our engagement, was behaving one hour with objectionable
particularity to another woman, was she to be consenting the next to a
proposal which might have made every previous caution useless?--Had we
been met walking together between Donwell and Highbury, the truth must
have been suspected.--I was mad enough, however, to resent.--I doubted
her affection. I doubted it more the next day on Box Hill; when,
provoked by such conduct on my side, such shameful, insolent neglect
of her, and such apparent devotion to Miss W., as it would have been
impossible for any woman of sense to endure, she spoke her resentment in
a form of words perfectly intelligible to me.--In short, my dear
madam, it was a quarrel blameless on her side, abominable on mine; and
I returned the same evening to Richmond, though I might have staid with
you till the next morning, merely because I would be as angry with
her as poss