er than an affectionate sister; and will be able to account for the
words witchcraft, syren, and such like, thrown out against you; and for
her driving on for a fixed day for sacrificing you to Solmes: in short,
for her rudeness and violence of every kind.

What a sweet revenge will she take, as well upon Lovelace as upon you,
if she can procure her rival sister to be married to the man that sister
hates; and so prevent her having the man whom she herself loves (whether
she have hope of him or not), and whom she suspects her sister loves!

Poisons and poniard have often been set to work by minds inflamed by
disappointed love, and actuated by revenge.--Will you wonder, then, that
the ties of relationship in such a case have no force, and that a sister
forgets to be a sister?

Now I know this to be her secret motive, (the more grating to her, as
her pride is concerned to make her disavow it), and can consider it
joined with her former envy, and as strengthened by a brother, who has
such an ascendant over the whole family; and whose interest (slave to it
as he always was) engaged him to ruin you with every one: both possessed
of the ears of all your family, and having it as much in their power as
in their will to misrepresent all you say, all you do; such subject also
as to the rencounter, and Lovelace's want of morals, to expatiate upon:
your whole family likewise avowedly attached to the odious man by means
of the captivating proposals he has made them;--when I consider all
these things, I am full of apprehensions for you.--O my dear, how will
you be able to maintain your ground;--I am sure, (alas! I am too sure)
that they will subdue such a fine spirit as yours, unused to opposition;
and (tell it not in Gath) you must be Mrs. Solmes!

Mean time, it is now easy, as you will observe, to guess from what
quarter the report I mentioned to you in one of my former, came,
That the younger sister has robbed the elder of her lover:* for Betty
whispered it, at the time she whispered the rest, that neither Lovelace
nor you had done honourably by her young mistress.--How cruel, my dear,
in you, to rob the poor Bella of the only lover she only had!--At the
instant too that she was priding herself, that now at last she should
have it in her power not only to gratify her own susceptibilities, but
to give an example to the flirts of her sex** (my worship's self in
her eye) how to govern their man with a silken rein, and without a
cur