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Familiar Studies of Men and Books by Robert Louis Stevenson
page 68 of 332 (20%)
About the beginning of December (1787), a new period opens in
the story of the poet's random affections. He met at a tea
party one Mrs. Agnes M'Lehose, a married woman of about his
own age, who, with her two children, had been deserted by an
unworthy husband. She had wit, could use her pen, and had
read WERTHER with attention. Sociable, and even somewhat
frisky, there was a good, sound, human kernel in the woman; a
warmth of love, strong dogmatic religious feeling, and a
considerable, but not authoritative, sense of the
proprieties. Of what biographers refer to daintily as "her
somewhat voluptuous style of beauty," judging from the
silhouette in Mr. Scott Douglas's invaluable edition, the
reader will be fastidious if he does not approve. Take her
for all in all, I believe she was the best woman Burns
encountered. The pair took a fancy for each other on the
spot; Mrs. M'Lehose, in her turn, invited him to tea; but the
poet, in his character of the Old Hawk, preferred a TETE-A-
TETE, excused himself at the last moment, and offered a visit
instead. An accident confined him to his room for nearly a
month, and this led to the famous Clarinda and Sylvander
correspondence. It was begun in simple sport; they are
already at their fifth or sixth exchange, when Clarinda
writes: "It is really curious so much FUN passing between two
persons who saw each other only ONCE;" but it is hardly safe
for a man and woman in the flower of their years to write
almost daily, and sometimes in terms too ambiguous, sometimes
in terms too plain, and generally in terms too warm, for mere
acquaintance. The exercise partakes a little of the nature
of battering, and danger may be apprehended when next they
meet. It is difficult to give any account of this remarkable
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