Be her preference of the single life to me also remembered!—­That she despises me!—­That she even refuses to be my wife!—­A proud Lovelace to be denied a wife!—­To be more proudly rejected by a daughter of the Harlowes!—­The ladies of my own family, [she thinks them the ladies of my family,] supplicating in vain for her returning favour to their despised kinsman, and taking laws from her still prouder punctilio!

Be the execrations of her vixen friend likewise remembered, poured out upon me from her representations, and thereby made her own execrations!

Be remembered still more particularly the Townsend plot, set on foot between them, and now, in a day or two, ready to break out; and the sordid threatening thrown out against me by that little fury!

Is not this the crisis for which I have been long waiting?  Shall Tomlinson, shall these women be engaged; shall so many engines be set at work, at an immense expense, with infinite contrivance; and all to no purpose?

Is not this the hour of her trial—­and in her, of the trial of the virtue of her whole sex, so long premeditated, so long threatened?—­Whether her frost be frost indeed?  Whether her virtue be principle?  Whether, if once subdued, she will not be always subdued?  And will she not want the crown of her glory, the proof of her till now all-surpassing excellence, if I stop short of the ultimate trial?

Now is the end of purposes long over-awed, often suspended, at hand.  And need I go throw the sins of her cursed family into the too-weighty scale?

[Abhorred be force!—­be the thoughts of force!—­There’s no triumph over the will in force!] This I know I have said.* But would I not have avoided it, if I could?  Have I not tried every other method?  And have I any other resource left me?  Can she resent the last outrage more than she has resented a fainter effort?—­And if her resentments run ever so high, cannot I repair by matrimony?—­She will not refuse me, I know, Jack:  the haughty beauty will not refuse me, when her pride of being corporally inviolate is brought down; when she can tell no tales, but when, (be her resistance what it will,) even her own sex will suspect a yielding in resistance; and when that modesty, which may fill her bosom with resentment, will lock up her speech.

* Vol.  IV.  Letter XLVIII.

But how know I, that I have not made my own difficulties?  Is she not a woman!  What redress lies for a perpetuated evil?  Must she not live?  Her piety will secure her life.—­And will not time be my friend!  What, in a word, will be her behaviour afterwards?—­She cannot fly me!—­She must forgive me—­and as I have often said, once forgiven, will be for ever forgiven.

Why then should this enervating pity unsteel my foolish heart?

It shall not.  All these things will I remember; and think of nothing else, in order to keep up a resolution, which the women about me will have it I shall be still unable to hold.