I am not exempt from violent passions, Sir, any more than your friend; but then I hope they are only capable of being raised by other people’s insolence, and not by my own arrogance.  If ever I am stimulated by my imperfections and my resentments to act against my judgment and my cousin’s injunctions, some such reflections as these that follow will run away with my reason.  Indeed they are always present with me.

In the first place; my own disappointment:  who came over with the hope of
      passing the remainder of my days in the conversation of a kinswoman
      so beloved; and to whom I have a double relation as her cousin and
      trustee.

Then I reflect, too, too often perhaps for my engagements to her in her
      last hours, that the dear creature could only forgive for herself. 
      She, no doubt, is happy:  but who shall forgive for a whole family,
      in all its branches made miserable for their lives?

That the more faulty her friends were as to her, the more enormous his
      ingratitude, and the more inexcusable—­What!  Sir, was it not enough
      that she suffered what she did for him, but the barbarian must make
      her suffer for her sufferings for his sake?—­Passion makes me
      express this weakly; passion refuses the aid of expression
      sometimes, where the propriety of a resentment prima facie declares
      expression to be needless.  I leave it to you, Sir, to give this
      reflection its due force.

That the author of this diffusive mischief perpetuated it premeditatedly,
      wantonly, in the gaiety of his heart.  To try my cousin, say you,
      Sir!  To try the virtue of a Clarissa, Sir!—­Has she then given him
      any cause to doubt her virtue?—­It could not be.—­If he avers that
      she did, I am indeed called upon—­but I will have patience.

That he carried her, as now appears, to a vile brothel, purposely to put
      her out of all human resource; himself out of the reach of all
      human remorse:  and that, finding her proof against all the common
      arts of delusion, base and unmanly arts were there used to effect
      his wicked purposes.  Once dead, the injured saint, in her will,
      says, he has seen her.

That I could not know this, when I saw him at M. Hall:  that, the object
      of his attempts considered, I could not suppose there was such a
      monster breathing as he:  that it was natural for me to impute her
      refusal of him rather to transitory resentment, to consciousness of
      human frailty, and mingled doubts of the sincerity of his offers,
      than to villanies, which had given the irreversible blow, and had
      at that instant brought her down to the gates of death, which in a
      very few days enclosed her.

That he is a man of defiance:  a man who thinks to awe every one by his
      insolent darings, and by his pretensions to superior courage and
      skill.