n their cause, and to assert an authority they are resolved, right
or wrong, (or I could do nothing,) to maintain.

And what my motive, dost thou ask? No less than this, That my beloved
shall find no protection out of my family; for, if I know hers, fly she
must, or have the man she hates. This, therefore, if I take my measures
right, and my familiar fail me not, will secure her mine, in spite of
them all; in spite of her own inflexible heart: mine, without condition;
without reformation-promises; without the necessity of a siege of years,
perhaps; and to be even then, after wearing the guise of merit-doubting
hypocrisy, at an uncertainty, upon a probation unapproved of. Then shall
I have all the rascals and rascalesses of the family come creeping to
me: I prescribing to them; and bringing that sordidly imperious brother
to kneel at the footstool of my throne.

All my fear arises from the little hold I have in the heart of this
charming frost-piece: such a constant glow upon her lovely features:
eyes so sparkling: limbs so divinely turned: health so florid: youth so
blooming: air so animated--to have an heart so impenetrable: and I, the
hitherto successful Lovelace, the addresser--How can it be? Yet there
are people, and I have talked with some of them, who remember that
she was born. Her nurse Norton boasts of her maternal offices in her
earliest infancy; and in her education gradatim. So there is full proof,
that she came not from above all at once an angel! How then can she be
so impenetrable?

But here's her mistake; nor will she be cured of it--She takes the man
she calls her father [her mother had been faultless, had she not been
her father's wife]; she takes the men she calls her uncles; the fellow
she calls her brother; and the poor contemptible she calls her sister;
to be her father, to be her uncles, her brother, her sister; and that,
as such, she owes to some of them reverence, to others respect, let them
treat her ever so cruelly!--Sordid ties!--Mere cradle prejudices!--For
had they not been imposed upon her by Nature, when she was in a perverse
humour, or could she have chosen her relations, would any of these have
been among them?

How my heart rises at her preference of them to me, when she is
convinced of their injustice to me! Convinced, that the alliance would
do honour to them all--herself excepted; to whom every one owes honour;
and from whom the most princely family might receive it. But how much