Note 13: — Chapter IX

'My affection for you has not been, altogether, irrational or selfish. While I felt that I loved you, as no other woman, I was convinced, would love you—I conceived, could I once engage your heart, I could satisfy, and even, purify it. While I loved your virtues, I thought I saw, and I lamented, the foibles which sullied them. I suspected you, perhaps erroneously, of pride, ambition, the love of distinction; yet your ambition could not, I thought, be of an ignoble nature—I feared that the gratifications you sought, if, indeed, attainable, were factitious—I even fancied I perceived you, against your better judgment, labouring to seduce yourself!' "He is under a delusion," said I, to myself;—"reason may be stunned, or blinded, for awhile; but it will revive in the heart, and do its office, when sophistry will be of no avail." I saw you struggling with vexations, that I was assured might be meliorated by tender confidence—I longed to pour its balms into your bosom. My sensibility disquieted you, and myself, only because it was constrained. I thought I perceived a conflict in your mind—I watched its progress with attention and solicitude. A thousand times has my fluttering heart yearned to break the cruel chains that fettered it, and to chase the cloud, which stole over your brow, by the tender, yet chaste, caresses and endearments of ineffable affection! My feelings became too highly wrought, and altogether insupportable. Sympathy for your situation, zeal for your virtues, love for your mind, tenderness for your person—a complication of generous, affecting, exquisite, emotions, impelled me to make one great effort.—"13 The world might call my plans absurd, my views romantic, my pretensions extravagant—Was I, or was I not, guilty of any crime, when, in the very acme of the passions, I so totally disregarded the customs of the world?" Ah! what were my sensations—what did I not suffer, in the interval?—and you prolonged that cruel interval—and still you suffer me to doubt, whether, at the moment in my life when I was actuated by the highest, the most fervent, the most magnanimous, principles—whether, at that moment, when I most deserved your respect, I did not for ever forfeit it.