r say your heart is free! You deceive yourself if you
think it is.

Thus to be driven [and I wrung my hands through impatience] by the
instigations of a designing, an ambitious brother, and by a sister,
that--

How often, Clary, must I forbid your unsisterly reflections?--Does not
your father, do not your uncles, does not every body, patronize
Mr. Solmes? And let me tell you, ungrateful girl, and unmovable as
ungrateful, let me repeatedly tell you, that it is evident to me, that
nothing but a love unworthy of your prudence can make you a creature
late so dutiful, now so sturdy. You may guess what your father's first
question on his return will be. He must know, that I can do nothing with
you. I have done my part. Seek me, if your mind change before he comes
back: you have yet a little more time, as he stays supper. I will no
more seek you, nor to you.--And away she flung.

What could I do but weep?

I am extremely affected on my mother's account--more, I must needs say,
than on my own. And indeed, all things considered, and especially, that
the measure she is engaged in, is (as I dare say it is) against her own
judgment, she deserves more compassion than myself.--Excellent woman!
What pity, that meekness and condescension should not be attended with
the due rewards of those charming graces!--Yet had she not let violent
spirits (as I have elsewhere observed with no small regret) find their
power over hers, it could not have been thus.

But here, run away with my pen, I suffer my mother to be angry with me
on her own account. She hinted to me, indeed, that I must seek her, if
my mind changed; which is a condition that amounts to a prohibition of
attending her: but, as she left me in displeasure, will it not have a
very obstinate appearance, and look like a kind of renunciation of her
mediation in my favour, if I go not down before my father returns, to
supplicate her pity, and her kind report to him?

I will attend her. I had rather all the world should be angry with me
than my mamma!

Mean time, to clear my hands from papers of such a nature, Hannah shall
deposit this. If two or three letters reach you together, they will but
express from one period to another, the anxieties and difficulties which
the mind of your unhappy but ever affectionate friend labours under.

CL. H.

LETTER XXI

MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE, TO MISS HOWE SAT. NIGHT.

I have been down. I am to be unlucky in all I do, I think, be my