And then he came with his If’s and And’s—­and it would have been, and still, as he believed, would be, love, and a love of the exalted kind, if I would encourage it by the right sort of love he talked of:  and, in justification of his opinion, pleaded her own confessions, as well those of yesterday, as of this morning:  and even went so far back as to my ipecacuanha illness.

I never talked so familiarly with his godship before:  thou mayest think, therefore, that his dialect sounded oddly in my ears.  And then he told me, how often I had thrown cold water upon the most charming flame that ever warmed a lady’s bosom, while but young and rising.

I required a definition of this right sort of love, he tried at it:  but made a sorry hand of it:  nor could I, for the soul of me, be convinced, that what he meant to extol was love.

Upon the whole, we had a noble controversy upon this subject, in which he insisted upon the unprecedented merit of the lady.  Nevertheless I got the better of him; for he was struck absolutely dumb, when (waving her present perverseness, which yet was a sufficient answer to all his pleas) I asserted, and offered to prove it, by a thousand instances impromptu, that love was not governed by merit, nor could be under the dominion of prudence, or any other reasoning power:  and if the lady were capable of love, it was of such a sort as he had nothing to do with, and which never before reigned in a female heart.

I asked him, what he thought of her flight from me, at a time when I was more than half overcome by the right sort of love he talked of?—­And then I showed him the letter she wrote, and left behind her for me, with an intention, no doubt, absolutely to break my heart, or to provoke me to hang, drown, or shoot myself; to say nothing of a multitude of declarations from her, defying his power, and imputing all that looked like love in her behaviour to me, to the persecution and rejection of her friends; which made her think of me but as a last resort.

Love then gave her up.  The letter, he said, deserved neither pardon nor excuse.  He did not think he had been pleading for such a declared rebel.  And as to the rest, he should be a betrayer of the rights of his own sovereignty, if what I had alleged were true, and he were still to plead for her.

I swore to the truth of all.  And truly I swore:  which perhaps I do not always do.

And now what thinkest thou must become of the lady, whom love itself gives up, and conscience cannot plead for?

LETTER V

Mr. Lovelace, to John Belford, ESQ. 
Sunday afternoon.

O Belford! what a hair’s-breadth escape have I had!—­Such a one, that I tremble between terror and joy, at the thought of what might have happened, and did not.

What a perverse girl is this, to contend with her fate; yet has reason to think, that her very stars fight against her!  I am the luckiest of me!—­But my breath almost fails me, when I reflect upon what a slender thread my destiny hung.