“You will censure me, no doubt, that my mother’s injunctions made not a more lasting impression.  But really I struggled hard with myself to give them their due force:  and the dear girl, as I said, every day grew lovelier, and more accomplished.  Her letters were but so many links to the chains in which she had bound me; and though once I had resolved to part with her to Lady Davers, and you, Madam, had an intention to take her, I could not for my life give her up; and thinking more honourably then of the state of a mistress than I have done since, I could not persuade myself (since I intended to do as handsomely by her as ever man did to a lady in that situation) but that I should do better for her than my mother had wished me to do, and so more than answer all her injunctions, as to the providing for her:  and I could not imagine I should meet with a resistance I had seldom encountered from persons much her superiors as to descent; and was amazed at it; for it confounded me in all the notions I had of her sex, which, like a true libertine, I supposed wanted nothing but importunity and opportunity, a bold attempter, and a mind not ungenerous.  Sometimes I admired her for her virtue; at other times, impetuous in my temper, and unused to control, I could have beat her.  She well, I remember, describes the tumults of my soul, repeating what once passed between us, in words like, these:—­’Take the little witch from me, Mrs. Jervis.—­I can neither bear, nor forbear her—­But stay-you shan’t go—­Yet be gone!—­No, come back again.’—­She thought I was mad, she says in her papers.  Indeed I was little less.  She says, I took her arm, and griped it black and blue, to bring her back again; and then sat down and looked at her as silly as such a poor girl as she!—­Well did she describe the passion I struggled with; and no one can conceive how much my pride made me despise myself at times for the little actions my love for her put me upon, and yet to find that love increasing every day, as her charms and her resistance increased.—­I have caught myself in a raging fit, sometimes vowing I would have her, and, at others, jealous that, to secure herself from my attempts, she would throw herself into the arms of some menial or inferior, whom otherwise she would not have thought of.

“Sometimes I soothed, sometimes threatened her; but never was such courage, when her virtue seemed in danger, mixed with so much humility, when her fears gave way to her hopes of a juster treatment.—­Then I would think it impossible (so slight an opinion had I of woman’s virtue) that such a girl as this, cottage-born, who owed every thing to my family, and had an absolute dependence upon my pleasure:  myself not despicable in person or mind, as I supposed; she unprejudiced in any man’s favour, at an age susceptible of impressions, and a frame and constitution not ice or snow:  ‘Surely,’ thought I, ’all this frost must be owing to the want of fire in my attempts to thaw it:  I used to dare more, and succeed better.  Shall such a girl as this awe me by her rigid virtue?  No, she shall not.’