I should indeed except that time of my grand trial when she appeared so much a wretch to me, that I saw her not (even after two days that she was kept from me) without great flutter and emotion of heart:  and I had represented to your brother before, how hard a condition it was for me to forgive so much unwomanly wickedness.

But, my dear ladies, when I considered the latter in one particular light, I could the more easily forgive her; and having forgiven her, bear her in my sight, and act by her (as a consequence of that forgiveness) as if she had not so horridly offended.  Else how would it have been forgiveness? especially as she was ashamed of her crime, and there was no fear of her repeating it.

Thus then I thought on the occasion:  “Poor wretched agent, for purposes little less than infernal!  I will forgive thee, since thy master and my master will have it so.  And indeed thou art beneath the resentment even of such a poor girl as I. I will pity thee, base and abject as thou art.  And she who is the object of my pity is surely beneath my anger.”

Such were then my thoughts, my proud thoughts, so far was I from being guilty of intentional meanness in forgiving, at Mr. B.’s interposition, the poor, low, creeping, abject self-mortified, and master-mortified, Mrs. Jewkes.

And do you think, ladies, when you revolve in your thoughts, who I was, and what I was, and what I had been designed for; when you revolve the amazing turn in my favour, and the prospects before me (so much above my hopes, that I left them entirely to Providence to direct for me, as it pleased, without daring to look forward to what those prospects seemed naturally to tend); when I could see my haughty persecutor become my repentant protector; the lofty spirit that used to make me tremble, and to which I never could look up without awe, except in those animating cases, where his guilty attempts, and the concern I had to preserve my innocence, gave a courage more than natural to my otherwise dastardly heart:  when this impetuous spirit could stoop to request one whom he had sunk beneath even her usual low character of his servant, who was his prisoner, under sentence of a ruin worse than death, as he had intended it, and had seized her for that very purpose, could stoop to acknowledge the vileness of that purpose; could say, at one time, that my forgiveness of Mrs. Jewkes should stand me in greater stead than I was aware of:  could tell her, before me, that she must for the future shew me all the respect due to one he must love; at another, acknowledged before her, that he had been stark naught, and that I was very forgiving; again, to Mrs. Jewkes, putting himself on a level with her, as to guilt, “We are both in generous hands:  and, indeed, if Pamela did not pardon you, I should think she but half forgave me, because