 of his own merit, that, in time, he should be able to indulge
that passion which had begun to glow within his breast.
    As her ladyship had undergone a vast variety of fortune and adventure, which
he had heard indistinctly related, with numberless errors and
misrepresentations, he was no sooner intitled, by the familiarity of
communication, to ask such a favour, than he earnestly intreated her to
entertain him with the particulars of her story; and, by dint of importunity,
she was at length prevailed upon (in a select partie) to gratify his curiosity
in these words.
 

                                Chapter LXXXVIII

The Memoirs of a Lady of Quality
 
By the circumstances of the story which I am going to relate, you will be
convinced of my candour, while you are informed of my indiscretion; and be
enabled, I hope, to perceive, that howsoever my head may have erred, my heart
hath always been uncorrupted, and that I have been unhappy, because I loved, and
was a woman.
    I believe I need not observe, that I was the only child of a man of good
fortune, who indulged me, in my infancy, with all the tenderness of paternal
affection; and when I was six years old, sent me to a private school, where I
stayed till my age was doubled, and became such a favourite, that I was (even in
those early days) carried to all the places of public diversion, the court
itself not excepted; an indulgence that flattered my love of pleasure, to which
I was naturally addicted, and encouraged those ideas of vanity and ambition,
which spring up so early in the human mind.
    I was lively and good-natured, my imagination apt to run riot, my heart
liberal and disinterested; though I was so obstinately attached to my own
opinions, that I could not well brook contradiction; and in the whole of my
disposition, resembled that of Henry the fifth, as described by Shakespear.
    In my thirteenth year I went to Bath, where I was first introduced into the
world as a woman, having been intitled to that privilege by my person, which was
remarkably tall for my years; and there my fancy was quite captivated by the
variety of diversions in which I was continually engaged: not that the parties
were altogether new to me, but because I now found myself considered as a person
of consequence, and surrounded by a croud of admirers, who courted my
acquaintance, and fed my vanity with praise and adulation. In short, whether or
not I deserved their encomiums, I leave the world to judge; but
