What thinkest thou of this, Jack?

Miss Howe is alarmed at my attempt to come at a letter of hers.

‘Were I to come at the knowledge of her freedoms with my character,’ she says, ‘she should be afraid to stir out without a guard.’  I would advise the vixen to get her guard ready.

‘I am at the head of a gang of wretches,’ [thee, Jack, and thy brother varlets, she owns she means,] ’who join together to betray innocent creatures, and to support one another in their villanies.’—­What sayest thou to this, Belford?

’She wonders not at her melancholy reflections for meeting me, for being forced upon me, and tricked by me.’—­I hope, Jack, thou’lt have done preaching after this!

But she comforts her, ’that she will be both a warning and an example to all her sex.’  I hope the sex will thank me for this!

The nymphs had not time, they say, to transcribe all that was worthy of my resentment in this letter:  so I must find an opportunity to come at it myself.  Noble rant, they say, it contains—­But I am a seducer, and a hundred vile fellows, in it.—­’And the devil, it seems, took possession of my heart, and of the hearts of all her friends, in the same dark hour, in order to provoke her to meet me.’  Again, ’There is a fate in her error,’ she says—­Why then should she grieve?—­’Adversity is her shining time,’ and I can’t tell what; yet never to thank the man to whom she owes the shine!

In the next letter,* wicked as I am, ’she fears I must be her lord and master.’

* See Letter XXIX. of this volume.

I hope so.

She retracts what she said against me in her last.—­My behaviour to my Rosebud; Miss Harlowe to take possession of Mrs. Fretchville’s house; I to stay at Mrs. Sinclair’s; the stake I have in my country; my reversions; my economy; my person; my address; [something like in all this!] are brought in my favour, to induce her now not to leave me.  How do I love to puzzle these long-sighted girls!

Yet ‘my teasing ways,’ it seems, ’are intolerable.’—­Are women only to tease, I trow?  The sex may thank themselves for teaching me to out-tease them.  So the headstrong Charles XII. of Sweden taught the Czar Peter to beat him, by continuing a war with the Muscovites against the ancient maxims of his kingdom.

’May eternal vengeance pursue the villain, [thank heaven, she does not say overtake,] if he give room to doubt his honour!’—­Women can’t swear, Jack—­sweet souls! they can only curse.

I am said, to doubt her love—­Have I not reason?  And she, to doubt my ardour—­Ardour, Jack!—­why, ’tis very right—­women, as Miss Howe says, and as every rake knows, love ardours!

She apprizes her, of the ’ill success of the application made to her uncle.’—­By Hickman no doubt!—­I must have this fellow’s ears in my pocket, very quickly I believe.