We all dined together in Mrs. Sinclair’s parlour:—­All excessively right!  The two nieces have topped their parts—­Mrs. Sinclair her’s.  Never was so easy as now!—­’She really thought a little oddly of these people at first, she said!  Mrs. Sinclair seemed very forbidding!  Her nieces were persons with whom she could not wish to be acquainted.  But really we should not be too hasty in our censures.  Some people improve upon us.  The widow seems tolerable.’  She went no farther than tolerable.—­’Miss Martin and Miss Horton are young people of good sense, and have read a great deal.  What Miss Martin particularly said of marriage, and of her humble servant, was very solid.  She believes with such notions she cannot make a bad wife.’  I have said Sally’s humble servant is a woolen-draper of great reputation; and she is soon to be married.

I have been letting her into thy character, and into the characters of my other three esquires, in hopes to excite her curiosity to see you to-morrow night.  I have told her some of the worst, as well as best parts of your characters, in order to exalt myself, and to obviate any sudden surprizes, as well as to teach her what sort of men she may expect to see, if she will oblige me with her company.

By her after-observation upon each of you, I shall judge what I may or may not do to obtain or keep her good opinion; what she will like, or what not; and so pursue the one or avoid the other, as I see proper.  So, while she is penetrating into your shallow heads, I shall enter her heart, and know what to bid my own to hope for.

The house is to be taken in three weeks.—­All will be over in three weeks, or bad will be my luck!—­Who knows but in three days?—­Have I not carried that great point of making her pass for my wife to the people below?  And that other great one, of fixing myself here night and day?  —­What woman ever escaped me, who lodged under one roof with me?—­The house too, the house; the people—­people after my own heart; her servants, Will. and Dorcas, both my servants.—­Three days, did I say!  Pho!  Pho!  Pho!—­three hours!

***

I have carried my third point:  but so extremely to the dislike of my charmer, that I have been threatened, for suffering Miss Partington to be introduced to her without her leave.  Which laid her under a necessity to deny or comply with the urgent request of so fine a young lady; who had engaged to honour me at my collation, on condition that my beloved would be present at it.

To be obliged to appear before my friends as what she was not!  She was for insisting, that I should acquaint the women here with the truth of the matter; and not go on propagating stories for her to countenance, making her a sharer in my guilt.

But what points will not perseverance carry? especially when it is covered over with the face of yielding now, and, Parthian-like, returning to the charge anon.  Do not the sex carry all their points with their men by the same methods?  Have I conversed with them so freely as I have done, and learnt nothing of them?  Didst thou ever know that a woman’s denial of any favour, whether the least or the greatest, that my heart was set upon, stood her in any stead?  The more perverse she, the more steady I—­that is my rule.