I have not near
done.
You bid me be good; and you threaten me, if I am not, with the ill
opinion of all your friends: but I have such an unaccountable bias for
roguery, or what shall I call it? that I believe it is impossible for me
to take your advice. I have been examining myself. What a deuse is the
matter with me, that I cannot see my honest man in the same advantageous
light in which he appears to everybody else? Yet I do not, in my heart,
dislike him. On the contrary, I know not, were I to look about me, far
and wide, the man I would have wished to have called mine, rather than
him. But he is so important about trifles; so nimble, yet so slow: he is
so sensible of his own intention to please, and has so many antic motions
in his obligingness; that I cannot forbear laughing at the very time that
I ought perhaps to reward him with a gracious approbation.
I must fool on a little while longer, I believe: permit me, Harriet, so
to do, as occasions arise.
***
An instance, an instance in point, Harriet. Let me laugh as I write. I
did at the time.--What do you laugh at, Charlotte?--Why this poor man,
or, as I should rather say, this lord and master of mine, has just left
me. He has been making me both a compliment, and a present. And what do
you think the compliment is? Why, if I please, he will give away to a
virtuoso friend, his collection of moths and butterflies: I once, he
remembered, rallied him upon them.
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