or to be worse than worst
      Of those that lawless and uncertain thought
      Imagines howling:  ’tis too horrible! 
      The weariest and most loaded worldly life,
      That pain, age, penury, and imprisonment,
      Can lay on nature, is a paradise
      To what we fear of death.——­

I find, by one of thy three letters, that my beloved had some account from Hickman of my interview with Miss Howe, at Col.  Ambrose’s.  I had a very agreeable time of it there; although severely rallied by several of the assembly.  It concerns me, however, not a little, to find our affair so generally known among the flippanti of both sexes.  It is all her own fault.  There never, surely, was such an odd little soul as this.—­Not to keep her own secret, when the revealing of it could answer no possible good end; and when she wants not (one would think) to raise to herself either pity or friends, or to me enemies, by the proclamation!—­Why, Jack, must not all her own sex laugh in their sleeves at her weakness? what would become of the peace of the world, if all women should take it into their heads to follow her example? what a fine time of it would the heads of families have?  Their wives always filling their ears with their confessions; their daughters with theirs:  sisters would be every day setting their brothers about cutting of throats, if the brothers had at heart the honour of their families, as it is called; and the whole world would either be a scene of confusion; or cuckoldom as much the fashion as it is in Lithuania.*

* In Lithuania, the women are said to have so allowedly their gallants, called adjutores, that the husbands hardly ever enter upon any part of pleasure without them.

I am glad, however, that Miss Howe (as much as she hates me) kept her word with my cousins on their visit to her, and with me at the Colonel’s, to endeavour to persuade her friend to make up all matters by matrimony; which, no doubt, is the best, nay, the only method she can take, for her own honour, and that of her family.

I had once thoughts of revenging myself on that vixen, and, particularly, as thou mayest* remember, had planned something to this purpose on the journey she is going to take, which had been talked of some time.  But, I think—­let me see—­yet, I think, I will let this Hickman have her safe and entire, as thou believest the fellow to be a tolerable sort of a mortal, and that I have made the worst of him:  and I am glad, for his own sake, he has not launched out too virulently against me to thee.

* See Vol.  IV.  Letter LIV.

But thou seest, Jack, by her refusal of money from him, or Miss Howe,* that the dear extravagant takes a delight in oddnesses, choosing to part with her clothes, though for a song.  Dost think she is not a little touched at times?  I am afraid she is.  A little spice of that insanity, I doubt, runs through her, that she had in a stronger degree, in the first week of my operations.  Her contempt of life; her proclamations; her refusal of matrimony; and now of money from her most intimate friends; are sprinklings of this kind, and no other way, I think, to be accounted for.