check to my revenge,
whenever I meditate treason against so sovereign a virtue. Conscience is
dead and gone, as I told thee; so it cannot be that. A young conscience
growing up, like the phoenix, from the ashes of the old one, it cannot
be, surely. But if it were, it would be hard, if I could not overlay a
young conscience.

Well, then, it must be LOVE, I fancy. LOVE itself, inspiring love of an
object so adorable--some little attention possibly paid likewise to thy
whining arguments in her favour.

Let LOVE then be allowed to be the moving principle; and the rather, as
LOVE naturally makes the lover loth to disoblige the object of its flame;
and knowing, that to an offence of the meditated kind will be a mortal
offence to her, cannot bear that I should think of giving it.

Let LOVE and me talk together a little on this subject--be it a young
conscience, or love, or thyself, Jack, thou seest that I am for giving
every whiffler audience. But this must be the last debate on this
subject; for is not her fate in a manner at its crisis? And must not my
next step be an irretrievable one, tend it which way it will?

***

And now the debate is over.

A thousand charming things, (for LOVE is gentler than CONSCIENCE,) has
this little urchin suggested in her favour. He pretended to know both
our hearts: and he would have it, that though my love was a prodigious
strong and potent love; and though it has the merit of many months,
faithful service to plead, and has had infinite difficulties to struggle
with; yet that it is not THE RIGHT SORT OF LOVE.

Right sort of love!--A puppy!--But, with due regard to your deityship,
said I, what merits has she with YOU, that you should be of her party?
Is her's, I pray you, a right sort of love? Is it love at all? She
don't pretend that it is. She owns not your sovereignty. What a d---l
I moves you, to plead thus earnestly for a rebel, who despises your
power?

And then he came with his If's and And's--and it would have been, and
still, as he believed, would be, love, and a love of the exalted kind, if
I would encourage it by the right sort of love he talked of: and, in
justification of his opinion, pleaded her own confessions, as well those
of yesterday, as of this morning: and even went so far back as to my
ipecacuanha illness.

I never talked so familiarly with his godship before: thou mayest think,
therefore, that his dialect sounded oddly in my ears. And then he t