The pretty simpleton knows nothing in the world; nor that people who have money never want assistants in their views, be they what they will.  How else could the princes of the earth be so implicitly served as they are, change they hands every so often, and be their purposes ever so wicked.

If I can but get her to go on with me till Wednesday next week, we shall be settled together pretty quietly by that time.  And indeed if she has any gratitude, and has in her the least of her sex’s foibles, she must think I deserve her favour, by the pains she has cost me.  For dearly do they all love that men should take pains about them and for them.

And here, for the present, I will lay down my pen, and congratulate myself upon my happy invention (since her obstinacy puts me once more upon exercising it.)—­But with this resolution, I think, that, if the present contrivance fail me, I will exert all the faculties of my mind, all my talents, to procure for myself a regal right to her favour and that in defiance of all my antipathies to the married state; and of the suggestions of the great devil out of the house, and of his secret agents in it.—­Since, if now she is not to be prevailed upon, or drawn in, it will be in vain to attempt her further.

LETTER XXVII

Mr. Lovelace, to John Belford, ESQ. 
Tuesday night, June 20.

No admittance yet to my charmer! she is very ill—­in a violent fever, Dorcas thinks.  Yet will have no advice.

Dorcas tells her how much I am concerned at it.

But again let me ask, Does this lady do right to make herself ill, when she is not ill?  For my own part, libertine as people think me, when I had occasion to be sick, I took a dose of ipecacuanha, that I might not be guilty of a falsehood; and most heartily sick was I; as she, who then pitied me, full well knew.  But here to pretend to be very ill, only to get an opportunity to run away, in order to avoid forgiving a man who has offended her, how unchristian!—­If good folks allow themselves in these breaches of a known duty, and in these presumptuous contrivances to deceive, who, Belford, shall blame us?

I have a strange notion that the matronly lady will be certainly at the grocer’s shop at the hour of nine tomorrow morning:  for Dorcas heard me tell Mrs. Sinclair, that I should go out at eight precisely; and then she is to try for a coach:  and if the dowager’s chariot should happen to be there, how lucky will it be for my charmer! how strangely will my dream be made out!

***

I have just received a letter from Captain Tomlinson.  Is it not wonderful? for that was part of my dream.

I shall always have a prodigious regard to dreams henceforward.  I know not but I may write a book upon that subject; for my own experience will furnish out a great part of it.  ‘Glanville of Witches,’ ’Baxter’s History of Spirits and Apparitions,’ and the ‘Royal Pedant’s Demonology,’ will be nothing at all to Lovelace’s Reveries.