Read "Clarissa Harlowe" by Samuel Richardson online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Sat. Mar. 4 Would you not have thought something might have been obtained in my favour, from an offer so reasonable, from an expedient so proper, as I imagine, to put a tolerable end, as from myself, to a correspondence I hardly know how otherwise, with safety to some of my family, to get rid of? -- But my brother's plan, (which my mother spoke of, and of which I have in vain endeavoured to procure a copy, with a design to take it to pieces, and expose it, as I question not there is room to do), joined with my father's impatience of contradiction, are irresistible.
I have not been in bed all night; nor am I in the least drowsy. Expectation, and hope, and doubt, (an uneasy state! ) kept me sufficiently wakeful. I stepped down at my usual time, that it might not be known I had not been in bed; and gave directions in the family way.