After he had thus baited his hook, and found easily enough the method how to lay it in my way, he played an opener game; and one day, going by his sister’s chamber when I was there, doing something about dressing her, he comes in with an air of gaiety. “Oh, Mrs. Betty,” said he to me, “how do you do, Mrs. Betty? Don’t your cheeks burn, Mrs. Betty?” I made a curtsy and blushed, but said nothing. “What makes you talk so, brother?” says the lady. “Why,” says he, “we have been talking of her belowstairs this half-hour.” “Well,” says his sister, “you can say no harm of her, that I am sure, so ’tis no matter what you have been talking about.” “Nay,” says he, “ ’tis so far from talking harm of her, that we have been talking a great deal of good, and a great many fine things have been said of Mrs. Betty, I assure you; and particularly, that she is the handsomest young woman in Colchester; and, in short, they begin to toast her health in the town.”
“I wonder at you, brother,” says the sister. “Betty wants but one thing, but she had as good want everything, for the market is against our sex just now; and if a young woman have beauty, birth, breeding, wit, sense, manners, modesty, and all these to an extreme, yet if she have not money, she’s nobody, she had as good want them all for nothing but money now recommends a woman; the men play the game all into their own hands.”
Her younger brother, who was by, cried, “Hold, sister, you run too fast; I am an exception to your rule. I assure you, if I find a woman so accomplished as you talk of, I say, I assure you, I would not trouble myself about the money.”
“Oh,” says the sister, “but you will take care not to fancy one, then, without the money.”
“You don’t know that neither,” says the brother.
“But why, sister,” says the elder brother, “why do you exclaim so at the men for aiming so much at the fortune? You are none of them that want a fortune, whatever else you want.”
“I understand you, brother,” replies the lady very smartly; “you suppose I have the money, and want the beauty; but as times go now, the first will do without the last, so I have the better of my neighbours.”
“Well,” says the younger brother, “but your neighbours, as you call them, may be even with you, for beauty will steal a husband sometimes in spite of money, and when the maid chances to be handsomer than the mistress, she oftentimes makes as good a market, and rides in a coach before her.”
I thought it was time for me to withdraw and leave them, and I did so, but not so far but that I heard all their discourse, in which I heard abundance of the fine things said of myself, which served to prompt my vanity, but, as I soon found, was not the way to increase my interest in the family, for the sister and the younger brother fell grievously out about it; and as he said some very disobliging things to her upon my account, so I could easily see that she resented them by her future conduct to me, which indeed was very unjust to me, for I had never had the least thought of what she suspected as to her younger brother; indeed, the elder brother, in his distant, remote way, had said a great many things as in jest, which I had the folly to believe were in earnest, or to flatter myself with the hopes of what I ought to have supposed he never intended, and perhaps never thought of.
It happened one day that he came running upstairs, towards the room where his sisters used to sit and work, as he often used to do; and calling to them before he came in, as was his way too, I, being there alone, stepped to the door, and said, “Sir, the ladies are not here, they are walked down the garden.” As I stepped forward to say this, towards the door, he was just got to the door, and clasping me in his arms, as if it had been by chance, “Oh, Mrs. Betty,” says he, “are you here? That’s better still; I want to speak with you more than I do with them;” and then, having me in his arms, he kissed me three or four times.
I struggled to get away, and yet did it but faintly neither, and he held me fast, and still kissed me, till he was almost out of breath, and then, sitting down, says, “Dear Betty, I am in love with you.”
His words, I must confess, fired my blood; all my spirits flew about my heart and put me into disorder enough, which he might easily have seen in my face. He repeated it afterwards several times, that he was in love with me, and my heart spoke as plain as a voice, that I liked it; nay, whenever he said, “I am in love with you,” my blushes plainly replied, “Would you were, sir.”
However, nothing else passed at that time; it was but a surprise, and when he was gone I soon recovered myself again. He had stayed longer with me, but he happened to look out at the
