Clarissa Harlowe by Samuel Richardson

Friday, June 2 Notwithstanding my studied-for politeness and complaisance for some days past; and though I have wanted courage to throw the mask quite aside; yet I have made the dear creature more than once look about her, by the warm, though decent expression of my passion. I have brought her to own, that I am more than indifferent with her: but as to love, which I pressed her to acknowledge, what need of acknowledgments of that sort, when a woman consents to marrying? -- And once repulsing me with displeasure, the proof of true love I was vowing for her, was respect, not freedom. And offering to defend myself, she told me, that all the conception she had been able to form of a faulty passion, was, that it must demonstrate itself as mine sought to do.

I endeavoured to justify my passion, by laying over-delicacy at her door. Over-delicacy, she said, was not my fault, if it were hers. She must plainly tell me, that I appeared to her incapable of distinguishing what were the requisites of a pure mind. Perhaps, had the libertine presumption to imagine, that there was no difference in heart, nor any but what proceeded from difference of education and custom, between the pure and impure -- and yet custom alone, as she observed, if I did so think, would make a second nature, as well in good as in bad habits. I have just now been called to account for some innocent liberties which I thought myself entitled to take before the women; as they suppose us to be married, and now within view of consummation.