eat alone. But
at night she sent up Kitty with a command, upon my obedience, to attend
her at supper.

I went down; but most gloriously in the sullens. YES, and NO, were great
words with me, to every thing she asked, for a good while.

That behaviour, she told me, should not do for her.

Beating should not do for me, I said.

My bold resistance, she told me, had provoked her to slap my hand; and
she was sorry to have been so provoked. But again insisted that I would
either give up my correspondence absolutely, or let her see all that
passed in it.

I must not do either, I told her. It was unsuitable both to my
inclination and to my honour, at the instigation of base minds to give
up a friend in distress.

She rung all the maternal changes upon the words duty, obedience, filial
obligation, and so forth.

I told her that a duty too rigorously and unreasonably exacted had been
your ruin, if you were ruined.

If I were of age to be married, I hope she would think me capable
of making, or at least of keeping, my own friendships; such a one
especially as this, with a woman too, and one whose friendship she
herself, till this distressful point of time, had thought the most
useful and edifying that I had ever contracted.

The greater the merit, the worse the action: the finer the talents, the
more dangerous the example.

There were other duties, I said, besides the filial one; and I hoped I
need not give up a suffering friend, especially at the instigation of
those by whom she suffered. I told her, that it was very hard to annex
such a condition as that to my duty; when I was persuaded, that both
duties might be performed, without derogating from either: that an
unreasonable command (she must excuse me, I must say it, though I were
slapped again) was a degree of tyranny: and I could not have expected,
that at these years I should be allowed now will, no choice of my
own! where a woman only was concerned, and the devilish sex not in the
question.

What turned most in favour of her argument was, that I desired to be
excused from letting her read all that passes between us. She insisted
much upon this: and since, she said, you were in the hands of the
most intriguing man in the world, and a man who had made a jest of
her favourite Hickman, as she had been told, she knows not what
consequences, unthought of by your or me, may flow from such a
correspondence.

So you see, my dear, that I fare the worse on Mr. Hickm