if, when you write
to me, you endeavour to keep from me any secret of your heart.

Let me add, that if you would clearly and explicitly tell me, how far
Lovelace has, or has not, a hold in your affections, I could better
advise you what to do, than at present I can. You, who are so famed
for prescience, as I may call it; and than whom no young lady ever had
stronger pretensions to a share of it; have had, no doubt, reasonings
in your heart about him, supposing you were to be one day his: [no doubt
but you have had the same in Solmes's case: whence the ground for the
hatred of the one; and for the conditional liking of the other.] Will
you tell me, my dear, what you have thought of Lovelace's best and of
his worst?--How far eligible for the first; how far rejectable for the
last?--Then weighing both parts in opposite scales, we shall see which
is likely to preponderate; or rather which does preponderate. Nothing
less than the knowledge of the inmost recesses of your heart, can
satisfy my love and my friendship. Surely, you are not afraid to trust
yourself with a secret of this nature: if you are, then you may the more
allowably doubt me. But, I dare say, you will not own either--nor is
there, I hope, cause for either.

Be pleased to observe one thing, my dear, that whenever I have given
myself any of those airs of raillery, which have seemed to make you look
about you, (when, likewise, your case may call for a more serious turn
from a sympathizing friend,) it has not been upon those passages which
are written, though, perhaps not intended, with such explicitness [don't
be alarmed, my dear!] as leaves little cause of doubt: but only when you
affect reserve; when you give new words for common things; when you
come with your curiosities, with your conditional likings, and with your
PRUDE-encies [mind how I spell the word] in a case that with every other
person defies all prudence--over-acts of treason all these, against the
sovereign friendship we have avowed to each other.

Remember, that you found me out in a moment. You challenged me. I owned
directly, that there was only my pride between the man and me; for I
could not endure, I told you, to think of any fellow living to give me a
moment's uneasiness. And then my man, as I have elsewhere said, was not
such a one as yours: so I had reason to impute full as much as to my own
inconsideration, as to his power over me: nay, more: but still more
to yours. For you reasoned