de to his interest. He is a declared
marriage-hater; a notorious intriguer; full of his
inventions, and glorying in them: he never could
draw you into declarations of love; nor till your
>>> wise relations persecuted you as they did, to receive
his addresses as a lover. He knew that you pro-
fessedly disliked him for his immoralities; he could
not, therefore, justly blame you for the coldness
and indifference of your behaviour to him.

>>> The prevention of mischief was your first main
view in the correspondence he drew you into. He
ought not, then, to have wondered that you declared
your preference of the single life to any matrimonial
engagement. He knew that this was always you
>>> preference; and that before he tricked you away
so artfully. What was his conduct to you
afterwards, that you should of a sudden change
it?

Thus was your whole behaviour regular, con-
sistent, and dutiful to those to whom by birth you
owed duty; and neither prudish, coquettish, nor
tyrannical to him.

>>> He had agreed to go on with you upon those
your own terms, and to rely only on his own merits
and future reformation for your favour.

>>> It was plain to me, indeed, to whom you com-
municated all that you knew of your own heart,
though not all of it that I found out, that love had
pretty early gained footing in it. And this you
yourself would have discovered sooner than you
>>> did, had not his alarming, his unpolite, his rough
conduct, kept it under.

>>> I knew by experience that love is a fire that is
not to be played with without burning one's fingers:
I knew it to be a dangerous thing for two single
persons of different sexes to enter into familiarity
and correspondence with each other: Since, as to
the latter, must not a person be capable of premedi-
tated art, who can sit down to write, and not write
from the heart?--And a woman to write her heart
to a man practised in deceit, or even to a man of
some character, what advantage does it give him
over her?

>>> As this man's vanity had made him imagine, that
no woman could be proof against love, when his
address was honourable; no wonder that he
struggled, like a lion held in toils, against a passion
that he thought not returned. And ho