very nice
cases, to have known what indifference was; yet not to have my ignorance
imputable to me as a fault. Oh! my dear! the finer sensibilities, if I
may suppose mine to be such, make not happy.

What a method had my friends intended to take with me! This, I dare
say, was a method chalked out by my brother. He, I suppose, was to have
presented me to all my assembled friends, as the daughter capable of
preferring her own will to the wills of them all. It would have been a
sore trial, no doubt. Would to Heaven, however, I had stood it--let the
issue have been what it would, would to Heaven I had stood it!

There may be murder, my aunt says. This looks as if she knew of
Singleton's rash plot. Such an upshot, as she calls it, of this unhappy
affair, Heaven avert!

She flies a thought, that I can less dwell upon--a cruel thought--but
she has a poor opinion of the purity she compliments me with, if she
thinks that I am not, by God's grace, above temptation from this sex.
Although I never saw a man, whose person I could like, before this
man; yet his faulty character allowed me but little merit from the
indifference I pretended to on his account. But, now I see him in nearer
lights, I like him less than ever. Unpolite, cruel, insolent!--Unwise!
A trifler with his own happiness; the destroyer of mine!--His last
treatment--my fate too visibly in his power--master of his own wishes,
[shame to say it,] if he knew what to wish for.--Indeed I never liked
him so little as now. Upon my word, I think I could hate him, (if I do
not already hate him) sooner than any man I ever thought tolerably
of--a good reason why: because I have been more disappointed in my
expectations of him; although they never were so high, as to have made
him my choice in preference to the single life, had that been
permitted me. Still, if the giving him up for ever will make my path to
reconciliation easy, and if they will signify as much to me, they shall
see that I never will be his: for I have the vanity to think my soul his
soul's superior.

You will say I rave: forbidden to write to my aunt, and taught to
despair of reconciliation, you, my dear, must be troubled with my
passionate resentments. What a wretch was I to give him a meeting, since
by that I put it out of my power to meet my assembled friends!--All
would now, if I had met them, been over; and who can tell when my
present distresses will?--Rid of both men, I had been now perhaps at my
aun