I can tell
you further, that he makes love to your sister's Betty: and that by my
advice. They will be married when he is established. An innkeeper's
wife is every man's mistress; and I have a scheme in my head to set some
engines at work to make her repent her saucy behaviour to you to the
last day of her life.

What a wicked schemer you are, Sir!--Who shall avenge upon you the still
greater evils which you have been guilty of? I forgive Betty with all
my heart. She was not my servant; and but too probably, in what she did,
obeyed the commands of her to whom she owed duty, better than I obeyed
those to whom I owed more.

No matter for that, the wretch said [To be sure, my dear, he must
design to make me afraid of him]: The decree was gone out--Betty must
smart--smart too by an act of her own choice. He loved, he said, to
make bad people their own punishers.--Nay, Madam, excuse me; but if the
fellow, if this Joseph, in your opinion, deserves punishment, mine is
a complicated; a man and his wife cannot well suffer separately, and it
may come home to him too.

I had no patience with him. I told him so. I see, Sir, said I, I see,
what a man I am with. Your rattle warns me of the snake.--And away I
flung: leaving him seemingly vexed, and in confusion.

LETTER XXII

MISS CLARISSA HARLOWE, TO MISS HOWE

My plain-dealing with Mr. Lovelace, on seeing him again, and the free
dislike I expressed to his ways, his manners, and his contrivances, as
well as to his speeches, have obliged him to recollect himself a little.
He will have it, that the menaces which he threw out just now against my
brother and Mr. Solmes, are only the effect of an unmeaning pleasantry.
He has too great a stake in his country, he says, to be guilty of such
enterprises as should lay him under a necessity of quitting it for ever.
Twenty things, particularly, he says, he has suffered Joseph Leman to
tell him of, that were not, and could not be true, in order to make
himself formidable in some people's eyes, and this purely with a view
to prevent mischief. He is unhappy, as far as he knows, in a quick
invention; in hitting readily upon expedients; and many things are
reported of him which he never said, and many which he never did, and
others which he has only talked of, (as just now,) and which he has
forgot as soon as the words have passed his lips.

This may be so, in part, my dear. No one man so young could be so
wicked as he has been repor