e with your own
observance of the advice I take the liberty to offer you: for I pretend
to say, I give better advice than I have taken. And so I had need. For,
I know not how it comes about, but I am, in my own opinion, a poor lost
creature: and yet cannot charge myself with one criminal or faulty
inclination. Do you know, my dear, how this can be?

Yet I can tell you how, I believe--one devious step at setting out!--
that must be it:--which pursued, has led me so far out of my path, that I
am in a wilderness of doubt and error; and never, never, shall find my
way out of it: for, although but one pace awry at first, it has led me
hundreds and hundreds of miles out of my path: and the poor estray has
not one kind friend, nor has met with one direct passenger, to help her
to recover it.

But I, presumptuous creature! must rely so much upon my own knowledge of
the right path!--little apprehending that an ignus fatuus with its false
fires (and ye I had heard enough of such) would arise to mislead me! And
now, in the midst of fens and quagmires, it plays around me, and around
me, throwing me back again, whenever I think myself in the right track.
But there is one common point, in which all shall meet, err widely as
they may. In that I shall be laid quietly down at last: and then will
all my calamities be at an end.

But how I stray again; stray from my intention! I would only have said,
that I had begun a letter to my cousin Morden some time ago: but that now
I can never end it. You will believe I cannot: for how shall I tell him
that all his compliments are misbestowed? that all his advice is thrown
away? all his warnings vain? and that even my highest expectation is to
be the wife of that free-liver, whom he so pathetically warns me to shun?

Let me own, however, have your prayers joined with my own, (my fate
depending, as it seems, upon the lips of such a man) 'that, whatever
shall be my destiny, that dreadful part of my father's malediction, that
I may be punished by the man in whom he supposes I put my confidence, may
not take place! that this for Mr. Lovelace's own sake, and for the sake
of human nature, may not be! or, if it be necessary, in support of the
parental authority, that I should be punished by him, that it may not be
by his premeditated or wilful baseness; but that I may be able to acquit
his intention, if not his action!' Otherwise, my fault will appear to be
doubled in the eye of the event-judg