ts from me to the very last, and wished to keep up the
game still longer, either to gratify her humour, her avarice, or her
vanity in playing with my passion, or to have me as a dernier resort,
in case of accidents. Again, it would have been nothing, if she had not
come up with her demure, well-composed, wheedling looks that morning,
and then met me in the evening in a situation, which (she believed)
might kill me on the spot, with no more feeling than a common courtesan
shews, who BILKS a customer, and passes him, leering up at her bully,
the moment after. If there had been the frailty of passion, it would
have been excusable; but it is evident she is a practised, callous jilt,
a regular lodging-house decoy, played off by her mother upon the
lodgers, one after another, applying them to her different purposes,
laughing at them in turns, and herself the probable dupe and victim of
some favourite gallant in the end. I know all this; but what do I gain
by it, unless I could find some one with her shape and air, to supply
the place of the lovely apparition? That a professed wanton should come
and sit on a man's knee, and put her arms round his neck, and caress
him, and seem fond of him, means nothing, proves nothing, no one
concludes anything from it; but that a pretty, reserved, modest,
delicate-looking girl should do this, from the first hour to the last of
your being in the house, without intending anything by it, is new, and,
I think, worth explaining. It was, I confess, out of my calculation,
and may be out of that of others. Her unmoved indifference and
self-possession all the while, shew that it is her constant practice.
Her look even, if closely examined, bears this interpretation. It is
that of studied hypocrisy or startled guilt, rather than of refined
sensibility or conscious innocence. "She defied anyone to read her
thoughts?" she once told me. "Do they then require concealing?" I
imprudently asked her. The command over herself is surprising. She
never once betrays herself by any momentary forgetfulness, by any
appearance of triumph or superiority to the person who is her dupe, by
any levity of manner in the plenitude of her success; it is one
faultless, undeviating, consistent, consummate piece of acting. Were
she a saint on earth, she could not seem more like one. Her
hypocritical high-flown pretensions, indeed, make her the worse: but
still the ascendancy of her will, her determined perseverance in