without them." So I told him the whole
story, "what conjurations, and what mighty magic I won his daughter
with," to be anything but MINE FOR LIFE. Nothing could well exceed
his astonishment and apparent mortification. "What I had said," he
owned, "had left a weight upon his mind that he should not easily get
rid of." I told him, "For myself, I never could recover the blow I had
received. I thought, however, for her own sake, she ought to alter her
present behaviour. Her marked neglect and dislike, so far from
justifying, left her former intimacies without excuse; for nothing could
reconcile them to propriety, or even a pretence to common decency, but
either love, or friendship so strong and pure that it could put on the
guise of love. She was certainly a singular girl. Did she think it
right and becoming to be free with strangers, and strange to old
friends?" I frankly declared, "I did not see how it was in human nature
for any one who was not rendered callous to such familiarities by
bestowing them indiscriminately on every one, to grant the extreme and
continued indulgences she had done to me, without either liking the man
at first, or coming to like him in the end, in spite of herself. When
my addresses had nothing, and could have nothing honourable in them, she
gave them every encouragement; when I wished to make them honourable,
she treated them with the utmost contempt. The terms we had been all
along on were such as if she had been to be my bride next day. It was
only when I wished her actually to become so, to ensure her own
character and my happiness, that she shrunk back with precipitation and
panic-fear. There seemed to me something wrong in all this; a want both
of common propriety, and I might say, of natural feeling; yet, with all
her faults, I loved her, and ever should, beyond any other human being.
I had drank in the poison of her sweetness too long ever to be cured of
it; and though I might find it to be poison in the end, it was still in
my veins. My only ambition was to be permitted to live with her, and to
die in her arms. Be she what she would, treat me how she would, I felt
that my soul was wedded to hers; and were she a mere lost creature, I
would try to snatch her from perdition, and marry her to-morrow if she
would have me. That was the question--"Would she have me, or would she
not?" He said he could not tell; but should not attempt to put any
constraint upon her inclinations,