There we drank and laughed [he relates], and she willingly suffered
me to put my hand in her bosom very wantonly, and keep it there
long. Which methought was very strange, and I looked upon myself as
a man mightily deceived in a lady, for I could not have thought she
could have suffered it by her former discourse with me; so modest
she seemed and I know not what.

It is a sad world for idealists.

Mr. Pepys's Puritanism, however, was something less than Mr. Pepys. It was
but a pair of creaking Sunday boots on the feet of a pagan. Mr. Pepys was
an appreciator of life to a degree that not many Englishmen have been
since Chaucer. He was a walking appetite. And not an entirely ignoble
appetite either. He reminds one in some respects of the poet in Browning's
"How it strikes a Contemporary," save that he had more worldly success.
One fancies him with the same inquisitive ferrule on the end of his stick,
the same "scrutinizing hat," the same eye for the bookstall and "the man
who slices lemon into drink." "If any cursed a woman, he took note."
Browning's poet, however, apparently "took note" on behalf of a higher
power. It is difficult to imagine Mr. Pepys sending his Diary to the
address of the Recording Angel. Rather, the Diary is the soliloquy of an
egoist, disinterested and daring as a bad boy's reverie over the fire.

Nearly all those who have written about Pepys are perplexed by the
question whether Pepys wrote his Diary with a view to its ultimate
publication. This seems to me to betray some ignorance of the working of
the human mind.

Those who find one of the world's puzzles in the fact that Mr. Pepys