Free Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe

said, I suppose I shall never be able to grant. I hope my warm sisters will be answered now, and blush a little.”
    This answer was surprising to them all, though less to the mother because of what I had said to her. As to the daughters, they stood mute a great while; but the mother said with some passion, “Well, I heard this before, but I could not believe it; but if it is so, then we have all done Betty wrong, and she has behaved better than I expected.” “Nay,” says the eldest sister, “if it is so, she has acted handsomely indeed.” “I confess,” says the mother, “it was none of her fault if he was enough fool to take a fancy to her; but to give such an answer to him shows more respect to us than I can tell how to express; I shall value the girl the better for it as long as I know her.” “But I shall not,” says Robin, “unless you will give your consent.” “I’ll consider of that awhile,” says the mother; “I assure you, if there were not some other objections, this conduct of hers would go a great way to bring me to consent.” “I wish it would go quite through with it,” says Robin; “if you had as much thought about making me easy as you have about making me rich, you would soon consent to it.”
    “Why, Robin,” says the mother again, “are you really in earnest? Would you fain have her?” “Really, madam,” says Robin, “I think ’tis hard you should question me again upon that head. I won’t say that I will have her. How can I resolve that point when you see I cannot have her without your consent? But this I will say: I am earnest that I will never have anybody else if I can help it. Betty or nobody is the word, and the question which of the two shall be in your breast to decide, madam, provided only that my good-humoured sisters here may have no vote in it.”
    All this was dreadful to me, for the mother began to yield, and Robin pressed her home in it. On the other hand, she advised with the eldest son, and he used all the arguments in the world to persuade her to consent; alleging his brother’s passionate love for me, and my generous regard to the family in refusing my own advantages upon such a nice point of honour, and a thousand such things. And as to the father, he was a man in a hurry of public affairs and getting money, seldom at home, thoughtful of the main chance, but left all those things to his wife.
    You may easily believe that when the plot was thus, as they thought, broke out, it was not so difficult or so dangerous for the elder brother, who nobody suspected of anything, to have a freer access than before; nay, the mother, which was just as he wished, proposed it to him to talk with Mrs. Betty. “It may be, son,” said she, “you may see farther into the thing than I, and see if she has been so positive as Robin says she has been, or no.” This was as well as he could wish, and he, as it were, yielding to talk with me at his mother’s request, she brought me to him into her own chamber, told me her son had some business with me at her request, and then she left us together and he shut the door after her.
    He came back to me and took me in his arms and kissed me very tenderly, but told me it was now come to that crisis that I should make myself happy or miserable as long as I lived; that if I could not comply to his desire, we should both be ruined. Then he told me the whole story between Robin, as he called him, and his mother and his sisters and himself, as above. “And now, dear child,” says he, “consider what it will be to marry a gentleman of a good family, in good circumstances, and with the consent of the whole house, and to enjoy all that the world can give you; and what, on the other hand, to be sunk into the dark circumstances of a woman that has lost her reputation; and that though I shall be a private friend to you while I live, yet as I shall be suspected always, so you will be afraid to see me and I shall be afraid to own you.”
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