ou want that is
in my power, command without reserve

Your ever affectionate ANNA HOWE.

LETTER II.

MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE, TO MISS HOWE. TUESDAY NIGHT.

I think myself obliged to thank you, my dear Miss Howe, for your
condescension, in taking notice of a creature who has occasioned you so
much scandal.

I am grieved on this account, as much, I verily think, as for the evil
itself.

Tell me--but yet I am afraid to know--what your mother said.

I long, and yet I dread, to be told, what the young ladies my
companions, now never more perhaps to be so, say of me.

They cannot, however, say worse of me than I will of myself. Self
accusation shall flow in every line of my narrative where I think I am
justly censurable. If any thing can arise from the account I am going to
give you, for extenuation of my fault (for that is all a person can
hope for, who cannot excuse herself) I know I may expect it from your
friendship, though not from the charity of any other: since by this time
I doubt not every mouth is opened against me; and all that know Clarissa
Harlowe condemn the fugitive daughter.

After I had deposited my letter to you, written down to the last hour,
as I may say, I returned to the ivy summer-house; first taking back my
letter from the loose bricks: and there I endeavoured, as coolly as my
situation would permit, to recollect and lay together several incidents
that had passed between my aunt and me; and, comparing them with some of
the contents of my cousin Dolly's letter, I began to hope, that I needed
not to be so very apprehensive as I have been next Wednesday. And thus I
argued with myself.

'Wednesday cannot possibly be the day they intend, although to
intimidate me they may wish me to think it is: for the settlements are
unsigned: nor have they been offered me to sign. I can choose whether I
will or will not put my hand to them; hard as it will be to refuse if my
father and mother propose, if I made compulsion necessary, to go to my
uncle's themselves in order to be out of the way of my appeals? Whereas
they intend to be present on Wednesday. And, however affecting to me the
thought of meeting them and all my friends in full assembly is, perhaps
it is the very thing I ought to wish for: since my brother and sister
had such an opinion of my interest in them, that they got me excluded
from their presence, as a measure which they thought previously
necessary to carry on their designs.

'Nor