I did not sleep a wink all that night;nor did I know till the next day the full meaning of what had happened to me.With the morning's light,conviction glared in upon me that I had not only lost her for ever--but every feeling I had ever had towards her--respect,tenderness,pity--all but my fatal passion,was gone.The whole was a mockery,a frightful illusion.I had embraced the false Florimel instead of the true;or was like the man in the Arabian Nights who had married a GOUL.How different was the idea I once had of her?Was this she,--"Who had been beguiled--she who was made Within a gentle bosom to be laid--To bless and to be blessed--to be heart-bare To one who found his bettered likeness there--To think for ever with him,like a bride--
To haunt his eye,like taste personified--
To double his delight,to share his sorrow,And like a morning beam,wake to him every morrow?
I saw her pale,cold form glide silent by me,dead to shame as to pity.
Still I seemed to clasp this piece of witchcraft to my bosom;this lifeless image,which was all that was left of my love,was the only thing to which my sad heart clung.Were she dead,should I not wish to gaze once more upon her pallid features?She is dead to me;but what she once was to me,can never die!The agony,the conflict of hope and fear,of adoration and jealousy is over;or it would,ere long,have ended with my life.I am no more lifted now to Heaven,and then plunged in the abyss;but I seem to have been thrown from the top of a precipice,and to lie groveling,stunned,and stupefied.I am melancholy,lonesome,and weaker than a child.The worst is,I have no prospect of any alteration for the better:she has cut off all possibility of a reconcilement at any future period.Were she even to return to her former pretended fondness and endearments,I could have no pleasure,no confidence in them.I can scarce make out the contradiction to myself.I strive to think she always was what I now know she is;but I have great difficulty in it,and can hardly believe but she still IS what she so long SEEMED.Poor thing!I am afraid she is little better off herself;nor do I see what is to become of her,unless she throws off the mask at once,and RUNS A-MUCK at infamy.
She is exposed and laid bare to all those whose opinion she set a value upon.Yet she held her head very high,and must feel (if she feels any thing)proportionably mortified.--A more complete experiment on character was never made.If I had not met her lover immediately after I parted with her,it would have been nothing.I might have supposed she had changed her mind in my absence,and had given him the preference as soon as she felt it,and even shewn her delicacy in declining any farther intimacy with me.But it comes out that she had gone on in the most forward and familiar way with both at once--(she could not change her mind in passing from one room to another)--told both the same barefaced and unblushing falsehoods,like the commonest creature;received presents from me to the very last,and wished to keep up the game still longer,either to gratify her humour,her avarice,or her vanity in playing with my passion,or to have me as a dernier resort,in case of accidents.Again,it would have been nothing,if she had not come up with her demure,well-composed,wheedling looks that morning,and then met me in the evening in a situation,which (she believed)might kill me on the spot,with no more feeling than a common courtesan shews,who BILKS a customer,and passes him,leering up at her bully,the moment after.If there had been the frailty of passion,it would have been excusable;but it is evident she is a practised,callous jilt,a regular lodging-house decoy,played off by her mother upon the lodgers,one after another,applying them to her different purposes,laughing at them in turns,and herself the probable dupe and victim of some favourite gallant in the end.I know all this;but what do I gain by it,unless I could find some one with her shape and air,to supply the place of the lovely apparition?That a professed wanton should come and sit on a man's knee,and put her arms round his neck,and caress him,and seem fond of him,means nothing,proves nothing,no one concludes anything from it;but that a pretty,reserved,modest,delicate-looking girl should do this,from the first hour to the last of your being in the house,without intending anything by it,is new,and,I think,worth explaining.It was,I confess,out of my calculation,and may be out of that of others.Her unmoved indifference and self-possession all the while,shew that it is her constant practice.
