And now comes a touch of the spur:  “However, preserve me your friendship, which I think of with a great deal of pleasure.  If ever you see me married, I flatter myself you’ll see a conduct you would not be sorry your wife should imitate.”

Even this did not bring Montagu to the point of asking Lord Dorchester for the hand of his daughter.  The correspondence, however, still continued, and soon they were hard at it again.

“Kindness, you say, would be your destruction,” she wrote in August, 1710.  “In my opinion, this is something contradictory to some other expressions.  People talk of being in love just as widows do of affliction.  Mr. Steele has observed, in one of his plays, the most passionate among them have always calmness enough to drive a hard bargain with the upholders.  I never knew a lover that would not willingly secure his interest as well as his mistress; or, if one must be abandoned, had not the prudence (among all his distractions) to consider, a woman was but a woman, and money was a thing of more real merit than the whole sex put together.  Your letter is to tell me, you should think yourself undone if you married me; but if I would be so tender as to confess I should break my heart if you did not, then you’d consider whether you would or no; but yet you hoped you should not.  I take this to be the right interpretation of—­even your kindness can’t destroy me of a sudden—­I hope I am not in your power—­I would give a good deal to be satisfied, &c.

“As to writing—­that any woman would do that thought she writ well.  Now I say, no woman of common sense would.  At best, ’tis but doing a silly thing well, and I think it is much better not to do a silly thing at all.  You compare it to dressing.  Suppose the comparison just:  perhaps the Spanish dress would become my face very well; yet the whole town would condemn me for the highest extravagance if I went to court in it, though it improved me to a miracle.  There are a thousand things, not ill in themselves, which custom makes unfit to be done.  This is to convince you I am so far from applauding my own conduct, my conscience flies in my face every time I think on’t.  The generality of the world have a great indulgence to their own follies:  without being a jot wiser than my neighbours, I have the peculiar misfortune to know and condemn all the wrong things I do.

“You beg to know whether I would not be out of humour.  The expression is modest enough; but that is not what you mean.  In saying I could be easy, I have already said I should not be out of humour:  but you would have me say I am violently in love; that is, finding you think better of me than you desire, you would have me give you a just cause to contemn me.  I doubt much whether there is a creature in the world humble enough to do that.  I should not think you more unreasonable if you was in love with my face, and asked me to disfigure it to make you easy.  I have heard of some nuns that made use of that expedient to secure their own happiness; but, amongst all the popish saints and martyrs, I never read of one whose charity was sublime enough to make themselves deformed, or ridiculous, to restore their lovers to peace and quietness.  In short, if nothing can content you but despising me heartily, I am afraid I shall be always so barbarous to wish you may esteem me as long as you live.”