He shall be very impatient, he says, till I see the whole; nor will he, if he finds he can have it, look farther till I have seen it, except any thing else offer to my liking.  The price he values not.

He now does nothing but talk of the ceremony, but not indeed of the day.  I don’t want him to urge that—­but I wonder he does not.

He has just now received a letter from Lady Betty Lawrance, by a particular hand; the contents principally relating to an affair she has in chancery.  But in the postscript she is pleased to say very respectful things of me.

They are all impatient, she says, for the happy day being over; which they flatter themselves will ensure his reformation.

He hoped, he told me, that I would soon enable him to answer their wishes and his own.

But, my dear, although the opportunity was so inviting, he urged not for the day.  Which is the more extraordinary, as he was so pressing for marriage before we came to town.

He was very earnest with me to give him, and four of his friends, my company on Monday evening, at a little collation.  Miss Martin and Miss Horton cannot, he says, be there, being engaged in a party of their own, with two daughters of Colonel Solcombe, and two nieces of Sir Anthony Holmes, upon an annual occasion.  But Mrs. Sinclair will be present, and she gave him hope of the company of a young lady of very great fortune and merit (Miss Partington), an heiress to whom Colonel Sinclair, it seems, in his lifetime was guardian, and who therefore calls Mrs. Sinclair Mamma.

I desired to be excused.  He had laid me, I said, under a most disagreeable necessity of appearing as a married person, and I would see as few people as possible who were to think me so.

He would not urge it, he said, if I were much averse:  but they were his select friends; men of birth and fortune, who longed to see me.  It was true, he added, that they, as well as his friend Doleman, believed we were married:  but they thought him under the restrictions that he had mentioned to the people below.  I might be assured, he told me, that his politeness before them should be carried into the highest degree of reverence.

When he is set upon any thing, there is no knowing, as I have said heretofore, what one can do.* But I will not, if I can help it, be made a show of; especially to men of whose character and principles I have no good opinion.  I am, my dearest friend,

Your ever affectionate
CL.  Harlowe.

* See Letter I. of this volume.  See also Vol.  II.  Letter XX.

***

[Mr. Lovelace, in his next letter, gives an account of his quick return: 
   of his reasons to the Lady for it:  of her displeasure upon it:  and of
   her urging his absence from the safety she was in from the situation
   of the house, except she were to be traced out by his visits.]

I was confoundedly puzzled, says he, on this occasion, and on her insisting upon the execution of a too-ready offer which I made her go down to Berks, to bring up my cousin Charlotte to visit and attend her.  I made miserable excuses; and fearing that they would be mortally resented, as her passion began to rise upon my saying Charlotte was delicate, which she took strangely wrong, I was obliged to screen myself behind the most solemn and explicit declarations.