perhaps already in a more relenting temper: "If you see Jean,
tell her I will meet her, so God help me in my hour of need."
They met accordingly; and Burns, touched with her misery,
came down from these heights of independence, and gave her a
written acknowledgment of marriage. It is the punishment of
Don Juanism to create continually false positions - relations
in life which are wrong in themselves, and which it is
equally wrong to break or to perpetuate. This was such a
case. Worldly Wiseman would have laughed and gone his way;
let us be glad that Burns was better counselled by his heart.
When we discover that we can be no longer true, the next best
is to be kind. I daresay he came away from that interview
not very content, but with a glorious conscience; and as he
went homeward, he would sing his favourite, "How are Thy
servants blest, O Lord!" Jean, on the other hand, armed with
her "lines," confided her position to the master-mason, her
father, and his wife. Burns and his brother were then in a
fair way to ruin themselves in their farm; the poet was an
execrable match for any well-to-do country lass; and perhaps
old Armour had an inkling of a previous attachment on his
daughter's part. At least, he was not so much incensed by
her slip from virtue as by the marriage which had been
designed to cover it. Of this he would not hear a word.
Jean, who had besought the acknowledgment only to appease her
parents, and not at all from any violent inclination to the
poet, readily gave up the paper for destruction; and all
parties imagined, although wrongly, that the marriage was
thus dissolved. To a proud man like Burns here was a
crushing blow. The concession which had been wrung from his
pity was now publicly thrown back in his teeth. The Armour