consents to marrying?--And once repulsing me with displeasure, the proof
of true love I was vowing for her, was RESPECT, not FREEDOM. And
offering to defend myself, she told me, that all the conception she had
been able to form of a faulty passion, was, that it must demonstrate
itself as mine sought to do.

I endeavoured to justify my passion, by laying over-delicacy at her door.
Over-delicacy, she said, was not my fault, if it were her's. She must
plainly tell me, that I appeared to her incapable of distinguishing what
were the requisites of a pure mind. Perhaps, had the libertine
presumption to imagine, that there was no difference in heart, nor any
but what proceeded from difference of education and custom, between the
pure and impure--and yet custom alone, as she observed, if I did so
think, would make a second nature, as well in good as in bad habits.


***


I have just now been called to account for some innocent liberties which
I thought myself entitled to take before the women; as they suppose us to
be married, and now within view of consummation.

I took the lecture very hardly; and with impatience wished for the happy
day and hour when I might call her all my own, and meet with no check
from a niceness that had no example.

She looked at me with a bashful kind of contempt. I thought it contempt,
and required the reason for it; not being conscious of offence, as I told
her.