w!--
So gracious, so noble, so unaffected a dear creature!'

'What a happy family,' chorus we all, 'will our's be!'

These and such like congratulatory admirations every hour repeated. Her
modesty hurt by the ecstatic praises:--'Her graces are too natural to
herself for her to be proud of them: but she must be content to be
punished for excellencies that cast a shade upon the most excellent!'

In short, we are here, as at Hampstead, all joy and rapture--all of us
except my beloved; in whose sweet face, [her almost fainting reluctance
to re-enter these doors not overcome,] reigns a kind of anxious serenity!
--But how will even that be changed in a few hours!

Methinks I begin to pity the half-apprehensive beauty!--But avaunt, thou
unseasonably-intruding pity! Thou hast more than once already well nigh
undone me! And, adieu, reflection! Begone, consideration! and
commiseration! I dismiss ye all, for at least a week to come!--But
remembered her broken word! Her flight, when my fond soul was meditating
mercy to her!--Be remembered her treatment of me in her letter on her
escape to Hampstead! Her Hampstead virulence! What is it she ought not
to expect from an unchained Beelzebub, and a plotting villain?

Be her preference of the single life to me also remembered!--That she
despises me!--That she even refuses to be my WIFE!--A proud Lovelace to
be denied a wife!--To be more proudly rejected by a daughter of the
Harlowes!--The ladies of my own family, [she thinks them the ladies of
my family,] supplicating in vain for her returning favour to their
despised kinsman, and taking laws from her still prouder punctilio!

Be the execrations of her vixen friend likewise remembered, poured out
upon me from her representations, and thereby made her own execrations!

Be remembered still more particularly the Townsend plot, set on foot
between them, and now, in a day or two, ready to break out; and the
sordid threatening thrown out against me by that little fury!

Is not this the crisis for which I have been long waiting? Shall
Tomlinson, shall these women be engaged; shall so many engines be set
at work, at an immense expense, with infinite contrivance; and all to
no purpose?

Is not this the hour of her trial--and in her, of the trial of the virtue
of her whole sex, so long premeditated, so long threatened?--Whether her
frost be frost indeed? Whether her virtue be principle? Whether, if
once subdued, she will not be