2.  Whether your ladyship wrote to Miss Montague to meet you at Reading,
    in order to attend you to your cousin Leeson’s, in Albemarle-street;
    on your being obliged to be in town on your old chancery affair, I
    remember are the words? and whether you bespoke your nephew’s
    attendance there on Sunday night the 11th?

3.  Whether your Ladyship and Miss Montague did come to town at that
    time; and whether you went to Hampstead, on Monday, in a hired coach
    and four, your own being repairing, and took from thence to town with
    the young creature whom you visited there?

Your Ladyship will probably guess, that the questions are not asked for reasons favourable to your nephew Lovelace.  But be the answer what it will, it can do him no hurt, nor me any good; only that I think I owe it to my former hopes, (however deceived in them,) and even to charity, that a person, of whom I was once willing to think better, should not prove so egregiously abandoned, as to be wanting, in every instance, to that veracity which is indispensable in the character of a gentleman.

Be pleased, Madam, to direct to me, (keeping the direction a secret for the present,) to be left at the Belle-Savage, on Ludgate hill, till called for.  I am

Your Ladyship’s most humble servant,
Clarissa Harlowe.

LETTER LVIII

Lady Betty Lawrance, to miss Cl.  Harlowe
Saturday, July 1.

DEAR MADAM,

I find that all is not as it should be between you and my nephew Lovelace.  It will very much afflict me, and all his friends, if he has been guilty of any designed baseness to a lady of your character and merit.

We have been long in expectation of an opportunity to congratulate you and ourselves upon an event most earnestly wished for by us all; since our hopes of him are built upon the power you have over him:  for if ever man adored a woman, he is that man, and you, Madam, are that woman.

Miss Montague, in her last letter to me, in answer to one of mine, inquiring if she knew from him whether he could call you his, or was likely soon to have that honour, has these words:  ’I know not what to make of my cousin Lovelace, as to the point your Ladyship is so earnest about.  He sometimes says he is actually married to Miss Cl.  Harlowe:  at other times, that it is her own fault if he be not.—­He speaks of her not only with love but with reverence:  yet owns, that there is a misunderstanding between them; but confesses that she is wholly faultless.  An angel, and not a woman, he says she is:  and that no man living can be worthy of her.’—­

This is what my niece Montague writes.

God grant, my dearest young lady, that he may not have so heinously offended you that you cannot forgive him!  If you are not already married, and refuse to be his, I shall lose all hopes that he ever will marry, or be the man I wish him to be.  So will Lord M. So will Lady Sarah Sadleir.