Read "Clarissa Harlowe" by Samuel Richardson online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Saturday, March 25 What can I advise you to do, my noble creature? Your merit is your crime. You can no more change your nature, than your persecutors can theirs. Your distress is owing to the vast disparity between you and them. What would you have of them? Do they not act in character? -- And to whom? To an alien. You are not one of them. They have two dependencies in their hope to move you to compliance.
-- Upon their impenetrableness one (I'd give it a more proper name, if I dared); the other, on the regard you have always had for your character, (Have they not heretofore owned as much? ) and upon your apprehensions from that of Lovelace, which would discredit you, should you take any step by his means to extricate yourself. Then they know, that resentment and unpersuadableness are not natural to you; and that the anger they have wrought you up to, will subside, as all extraordinaries soon do; and that once married, you will make the best of it.