you have often said, you scarcely know
one whom you could esteem; this generous friend is devoted to you with
a noble ardour, he proposes to you a lot, fairer than will ever again
present itself to you, should you now reject it; you know the situation
of your family, the critical state of our property; it is in your power
to become the benefactress of your mother, the protectress of your
sisters. Have you well reflected, my dear child, how cheerless your own
future prospects will be, if you should persist in your obstinacy?
Forsaken by men and women, in discord and enmity with your family,
lonely and utterly lost in a cold, insulting world, poor and without
succour! Will you not then review your youth with regret, and in bitter
anguish repent, that you so wantonly, so thoughtlessly, rejected all
happiness for yourself and your family? Does this generous man then
require from you love and passion, as they are described in our
perverse books? Does he wish for more than friendship and esteem? And
can you refuse him this? He is ready for all sacrifices, which our
pressing situation requires, and which his great wealth enables him to
make. But if you treat him with such cold scorn, and he withdraws
offended and affronted--who knows where your sisters or your mother,
and you yourself, at some time or other in your old age, may be forced
to beg a pitiful alms, where I may lay my head sick and helpless? and
then will your weeping eye cast back a look of vain regret upon these
days, which will be then for ever past."

"Say no more, my dearest mother!" cried Dorothea in the greatest
distress. "Oh, unhappily, unhappily, the right is all on your side, and
the wrong entirely on mine. No, I never yet loved, and never shall, my
heart is locked against that feeling; the men, with whom I have been
acquainted, inspire me all with a feeling of dislike, many with one of
pity, not to say contempt. I perceive that a marriage founded on
reason, which places us in a state or opulence and independence, must
be a desirable thing; that it is in my power to make you and all of us
happy by a single word, that it is certainly generous to speak it, that
it is perhaps forced from me by necessity, by filial duty, and the
noblest motives--and yet--why do my feelings shudder at it?--Ah, my
dear mother, if it were not for just one thing,--may I say it? Will you
not quite misunderstand me? O certainly! for I really do not understand
myself."

"Speak, my