th the assurance that I will be, while life is lent
me,

Your Ladyship's grateful and obliged servant,
CLARISSA HARLOWE.

LETTER LXII

MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE, TO MRS. NORTON
SUNDAY EVENING, JULY 2.

How kindly, my beloved Mrs. Norton, do you soothe the anguish of a
bleeding heart! Surely you are mine own mother; and, by some
unaccountable mistake, I must have been laid to a family that, having
newly found out, or at least suspected, the imposture, cast me from their
hearts, with the indignation that such a discovery will warrant.

Oh! that I had been indeed your own child, born to partake of your humble
fortunes, an heiress only to that content in which you are so happy! then
should I have had a truly gentle spirit to have guided my ductile heart,
which force and ungenerous usage sit so ill upon: and nothing of what has
happened would have been.

But let me take heed that I enlarge not, by impatience, the breach
already made in my duty by my rashness! since, had I not erred, my
mother, at least, could never have been thought hard-hearted and
unforgiving. Am I not then answerable, not only for my own faults, but
for the consequences of them; which tend to depreciate and bring disgrace
upon a maternal character never before called in question?

It is kind, however, in you to endeavour to extenuate the faults of one
so greatly sensible of it: and could it be wiped off entirely, it would
render me more worthy of the pains you have taken in my education: for it
must add to your grief, as it does to my confusion, that, after such
promising beginnings, I should have so behaved as to be a disgrace
instead of a credit to you and my other friends.

But that I may not make you think me more guilty than I am, give me leave
briefly to assure you, that, when my story is known, I shall be
to more compassion than blame, even on the score of going away with Mr.
Lovelace.

As to all that happened afterwards, let me only say, that although I must
call myself a lost creature as to this world, yet have I this consolation
left me, that I have not suffered either for want of circumspection, or
through careful credulity or weakness. Not one moment was I off my
guard, or unmindful of your early precepts. But (having been enabled to
baffle many base contrivances) I was at last ruined by arts the most
inhuman. But had I not been rejected by every friend, this low-hearted
man had not dared, nor would have had opportunity, to