than to admit you to the liberty I
have given you, but as I could not reconcile my judgment to marriage,
for the reasons above, and had kindness enough for you, and obligation
too much on me to resist you, I suffered your rudeness and gave up my
virtue. But I have two things before me to heal up that breach of honour
without that desperate one of marriage, and those are, repentance for
what is past, and putting an end to it for time to come."

He seemed to be concerned to think that I should take him in that
manner. He assured me that I misunderstood him; that he had more manners
as well as more kindness for me, and more justice than to reproach me
with what he had been the aggressor in, and had surprised me into; that
what he spoke referred to my words above, that the woman, if she thought
fit, might entertain a man, as a man did a mistress; and that I seemed
to mention that way of living as justifiable, and setting it as a lawful
thing, and in the place of matrimony.

Well, we strained some compliments upon those points, not worth
repeating; and I added, I supposed when he got to bed to me he thought
himself sure of me; and, indeed, in the ordinary course of things, after
he had lain with me he ought to think so, but that, upon the same foot
of argument which I had discoursed with him upon, it was just the
contrary; and when a woman had been weak enough to yield up the last
point before wedlock, it would be adding one weakness to another to take
the man afterwards, to pin down the shame of it upon herself all the
days of her life, and bind herself to live all her time with the only
man that could upbraid her with it; that in yielding at first, she must
be a fool, but to take the man is to be sure to be called fool; that to
resist a man is to act with courage and vigour, and to cast off the
reproach, which, in the course of things, drops out of knowledge and
dies. The man goes one way and the woman another, as fate and the
circumstances of living direct; and if they keep one another's counsel,
the folly is heard no more of. "But to take the man," says I, "is the
most preposterous thing in nature, and (saving your presence) is to
befoul one's self, and live always in the smell of it. No, no," added I;
"after a man has lain with me as a mistress, he ought never to lie with
me as a wife. That's not only preserving the crime in memory, but it is
recording it in the family. If the woman marries the man afterwards, she
bea