Oh, how I now cursed my infatuation! how passionately I recalled the
past! how coldly I turned from the hollow and false world, to whose
service I had sacrificed my happiness, to muse and madden over the
prospects I had destroyed and the loving and noble heart I had
rejected! Alas! after all, what is so ungrateful as that world for
which we renounce so much? Its votaries resemble the Gymnosophists of
old, and while they profess to make their chief end pleasure, we can
only learn that they expose themselves to every torture and every
pain!

Lord Merton, the man whom Caroline now called husband, was among the
wealthiest and most dissipated of his order; and two years after our
separation I met once more with the victim of my unworthiness, blazing
in "the full front" of courtly splendour, the leader of its gayeties
and the cynosure of her followers. Intimate with the same society, we
were perpetually cast together, and Caroline was proud of displaying
the indifference towards me, which, if she felt not, she had at least
learnt artfully to assume. This indifference was her ruin. The
depths of my evil passion were again sounded and aroused, and I
resolved yet to humble the pride and conquer the coldness which galled
to the very quick the morbid acuteness of my self-love. I again
attached myself to her train; I bowed myself to the very dust before
her. What to me were her chilling reply and disdainful civilities?---
only still stronger excitements to persevere.

I spare you and myself the gradual progress of my schemes. A woman
may recover her first passion, it is true; but then she must replace
it with another. That other was denied to Caroline: she had not even
children to engross her thoughts and to occupy her affections; and the