[Thus triumphing in his unpolite cruelty, he says,]

After her haughty treatment of me, I am resolved she shall speak out.  There are a thousand beauties to be discovered in the face, in the accent, in the bush-beating hesitations of a woman who is earnest about a subject she wants to introduce, yet knows not how.  Silly fellows, calling themselves generous ones, would value themselves for sparing a lady’s confusion:  but they are silly fellows indeed; and rob themselves of prodigious pleasure by their forwardness; and at the same time deprive her of displaying a world of charms, which can only be manifested on these occasions.

I’ll tell thee beforehand, how it will be with my charmer in this case—­ she will be about it, and about it, several times:  but I will not understand her:  at least, after half a dozen hem—­ings, she will be obliged to speak out—­I think, Mr. Lovelace—­I think, Sir—­I think you were saying some days ago—­Still I will be all silence—­her eyes fixed upon my shoe-buckles, as I sit over-against her—­ladies when put to it thus, always admire a man’s shoe-buckles, or perhaps some particular beauties in the carpet.  I think you said that Mrs. Fretchville—­Then a crystal tear trickles down each crimson cheek, vexed to have her virgin pride so little assisted.  But, come, my meaning dear, cry I to myself, remember what I have suffered for thee, and what I have suffered by thee!  Thy tearful pausings shall not be helped out by me.  Speak out, love!—­O the sweet confusion!  Can I rob myself of so many conflicting beauties by the precipitate charmer-pitying folly, by which a politer man [thou knowest, lovely, that I am no polite man!] betrayed by his own tenderness, and unused to female tears, would have been overcome?  I will feign an irresolution of mind on the occasion, that she may not quite abhor me—­that her reflections on the scene in my absence may bring to her remembrance some beauties in my part of it:  an irresolution that will be owing to awe, to reverence, to profound veneration; and that will have more eloquence in it than words can have.  Speak out then, love, and spare not.

Hard-heartedness, as it is called, is an essential of the libertine’s character.  Familiarized to the distresses he occasions, he is seldom betrayed by tenderness into a complaisant weakness unworthy of himself.

[Mentioning the settlements, he says,]

I am in earnest as to the terms.  If I marry her, [and I have no doubt that I shall, after my pride, my ambition, my revenge, if thou wilt, is gratified,] I will do her noble justice.  The more I do for such a prudent, such an excellent economist, the more shall I do for myself.—­ But, by my soul, Belford, her haughtiness shall be brought down to own both love and obligation to me.  Nor will this sketch of settlements bring us forwarder than I would have it.  Modesty of sex will stand my friend at any time.  At the very altar, our hands joined, I will engage to make this proud beauty leave the parson and me, and all my friends who should be present, though twenty in number, to look like fools upon one another, while she took wing, and flew out of the church door, or window, (if that were open, and the door shut); and this only by a single word.