urable terms of matrimony; but I
was at the Bath, where men find a mistress sometimes, but very rarely
look for a wife; and consequently all the particular acquaintances a
woman can expect to make there must have some tendency that way.

I had spent the first season well enough; for though I had contracted
some acquaintance with a gentleman who came to the Bath for his
diversion, yet I had entered into no felonious treaty, as it might be
called. I had resisted some casual offers of gallantry, and had
managed that way well enough. I was not wicked enough to come into the
crime for the mere vice of it, and I had no extraordinary offers made
me that tempted me with the main thing which I wanted.

However, I went this length the first season, viz. I contracted an
acquaintance with a woman in whose house I lodged, who, though she did
not keep an ill house, as we call it, yet had none of the best
principles in herself. I had on all occasions behaved myself so well
as not to get the least slur upon my reputation on any account
whatever, and all the men that I had conversed with were of so good
reputation that I had not given the least reflection by conversing with
them; nor did any of them seem to think there was room for a wicked
correspondence, if they had any of them offered it; yet there was one
gentleman, as above, who always singled me out for the diversion of my
company, as he called it, which, as he was pleased to say, was very
agreeable to him, but at that time there was no more in it.

I had many melancholy hours at the Bath after the company was gone; for
though I went to Bristol sometime for the disposing my effects, and for
recruits of money, yet I chose to come back to Bath for my residence,
because being on good terms with the woman in whose house I lodged in
the summer, I found that during the winter I lived rather cheaper there
than I could do anywhere else. Here, I say, I passed the winter as
heavily as I had passed the autumn cheerfully; but having contracted a
nearer intimacy with the said woman in whose house I lodged, I could
not avoid communicating to her something of what lay hardest upon my
mind and particularly the narrowness of my circumstances, and the loss
of my fortune by the damage of my goods at sea. I told her also, that
I had a mother and a brother in Virginia in good circumstances; and as
I had really written back to my mother in particular to represent my
condition, and the great loss