Free Moll Flanders by Daniel Defoe Page A

gave me no time to reply, but went on with me thus: “What has happened between us, child, so long as we both agree to do so, may be buried and forgotten. I shall always be your sincere friend, without any inclination to nearer intimacy when you become my sister; and we shall have all the honest part of conversation without any reproaches between us of having done amiss. I beg of you to consider it, and do not stand in the way of your own safety and prosperity; and to satisfy you that I am sincere,” added he, “I here offer you five hundred pounds to make you some amends for the freedoms I have taken with you, which we shall look upon as some of the follies of our lives, which ’tis hoped we may repent of.”
    He spoke this in so much more moving terms than it is possible for me to express that you may suppose as he held me above an hour and half in that discourse, so he answered all my objections and fortified his discourse with all the arguments that human wit and art could devise.
    I cannot say, however, that anything he said made impression enough upon me so as to give me any thought of the matter till he told me at last, very plainly, that if I refused, he was sorry to add that he could never go on with me in that station as we stood before; that though he loved me as well as ever and that I was as agreeable to him, yet the sense of virtue had not so forsaken him as to suffer him to lie with a woman that his brother courted to make his wife; that if he took his leave of me with a denial from me in this affair, whatever he might do for me in the point of support, grounded on his first engagement of maintaining me, yet he would not have me be surprised that he was obliged to tell me he could not allow himself to see me any more; and that, indeed, I could not expect it of him.
    I received this last part with some tokens of surprise and disorder and had much ado to avoid sinking down, for indeed I loved him to an extravagance not easy to imagine; but he perceived my disorder and entreated me to consider seriously of it; assured me that it was the only way to preserve our mutual affection; that in this station we might love as friends with the utmost passion, and with a love of relation untainted, free from our own just reproaches, and free from other people’s suspicions; that he should ever acknowledge his happiness owing to me; that he would be debtor to me as long as he lived and would be paying that debt as long as he had breath. Thus he wrought me up, in short, to a kind of hesitation in the matter; having the dangers on one side represented in lively figures and, indeed, heightened by my imagination of being turned out to the wide world a mere cast-off whore, for it was no less, and perhaps exposed as such, with little to provide for myself, with no friend, no acquaintance in the whole world out of that town, and there I could not pretend to stay. All this terrified me to the last degree, and he took care upon all occasions to lay it home to me in the worst colours. On the other hand, he failed not to set forth the easy, prosperous life which I was going to live.
    He answered all that I could object from affection and from former engagements with telling me the necessity that was before us of taking other measures now; and as to his promises of marriage, the nature of things, he said, had put an end to that by the probability of my being his brother’s wife before the time to which his promises all referred.
    Thus, in a word, I may say, he reasoned me out of my reason; he conquered all my arguments, and I began to see a danger that I was in, which I had not considered of before, and that was of being dropped by both of them and left alone in the world to shift for myself.
    This and his persuasion at length prevailed with me to consent, though with so much reluctance that it was easy to see I should go to church like a bear to the stake. I had some little apprehensions about me, too, lest my new spouse, who, by