him, would have
afforded sufficient occasion for the speculation of a sister; yet was
this manifest disregard, this failure in all the duties of a wife, a
friend, a neighbour, little worthy of consideration, when put in
comparison with her conduct in other points.

After the adventure of her detection, finding the minister was
resolved to support her, and that her husband durst not come to any
open breach with her, she immediately began to throw aside all regard
for decorum;--she seemed utterly to despise all sense of shame, and
even to glory in a life of continual dissolution;--the company she
kept of both sexes, were, for the most part, persons of abandoned
characters: whether she indulged herself in a plurality of amours, is
uncertain, though it was said she did so; but there was one man to
whom she was most particularly attached;--this was a person who had
formerly enjoyed a post under the government, but was turned out on
the score of misbehaviour, and had now no other support than what he
received from her:--with him she frequently passed whole nights, and
took so little care in concealing the place of their meeting, that the
sister of Natura easily found it out.

On relating the discovery she had made to some of their relations,
they advised her to tell her brother, imagining this glaring insult on
his honour would effectually rouse him out of the stupidity he
languished under:--she was of the same opinion, and took the first
opportunity of letting Natura into the whole infamous affair, not
without some apprehensions, that an excess of rage on hearing it,
might hurry him into a contrary extreme; but her terrors on this head
were presently dissipated, when having repeated many circumstances to
corroborate the truth of what she said, there appeared not the least
emotion in his countenance; and on her urging him to take some
measures to do himself justice, or at least to put a stop to this
licentiousness of a person whose dishonour was his own; all she could
get from him was, that he had neither regard enough for her to take
any pains for the reclaiming her, nor for the censure of the world on
himself, and desired she would not trouble him any farther on this
point.

This strange insensibility afforded cause to fear his faculties were
all too deeply absorbed in melancholy, for him ever to become a man of
the world again, and as she truly loved him, gave both her, and all
his other friends, an infinite concern.