I will do as you’d have me—­good Dorcas, look not upon me so fiercely—­ but thou canst not look so bad as I have seen somebody look.

Mr. Lovelace, now that I remember what I took pen in hand to say, let me hurry off my thoughts, lest I lose them again—­here I am sensible—­and yet I am hardly sensible neither—­but I know my head is not as it should be, for all that—­therefore let me propose one thing to you:  it is for your good—­not mine; and this is it: 

I must needs be both a trouble and an expense to you.  And here my uncle Harlowe, when he knows how I am, will never wish any man to have me:  no, not even you, who have been the occasion of it—­barbarous and ungrateful!  —­A less complicated villany cost a Tarquin—­but I forget what I would say again—­

Then this is it—­I never shall be myself again:  I have been a very wicked creature—­a vain, proud, poor creature, full of secret pride—­which I carried off under an humble guise, and deceived every body—­my sister says so—­and now I am punished—­so let me be carried out of this house, and out of your sight; and let me be put into that Bedlam privately, which once I saw:  but it was a sad sight to me then!  Little as I thought what I should come to myself!—­That is all I would say:  this is all I have to wish for—­then I shall be out of all your ways; and I shall be taken care of; and bread and water without your tormentings, will be dainties:  and my straw-bed the easiest I have lain in—­for—­I cannot tell how long!

My clothes will sell for what will keep me there, perhaps as long as I shall live.  But, Lovelace, dear Lovelace, I will call you; for you have cost me enough, I’m sure!—­don’t let me be made a show of, for my family’s sake; nay, for your own sake, don’t do that—­for when I know all I have suffered, which yet I do not, and no matter if I never do—­I may be apt to rave against you by name, and tell of all your baseness to a poor humbled creature, that once was as proud as any body—­but of what I can’t tell—­except of my own folly and vanity—­but let that pass—­since I am punished enough for it—­

So, suppose, instead of Bedlam, it were a private mad-house, where nobody comes!—­That will be better a great deal.

But, another thing, Lovelace:  don’t let them use me cruelly when I am there—­you have used me cruelly enough, you know!—­Don’t let them use me cruelly; for I will be very tractable; and do as any body would have me to do—­except what you would have me do—­for that I never will.—­Another thing, Lovelace:  don’t let this good woman, I was going to say vile woman; but don’t tell her that—­because she won’t let you send me to this happy refuge, perhaps, if she were to know it—­

Another thing, Lovelace:  and let me have pen, and ink, and paper, allowed me—­it will be all my amusement—­but they need not send to any body I shall write to, what I write, because it will but trouble them:  and somebody may do you a mischief, may be—­I wish not that any body do any body a mischief upon my account.