Why did she oblige me

to become a disputant with a plebeian?—Disputant!—What do I say?—Worse, worse!—Rival!—Devil!—Myriads of virtues could not atone the crime!—Yet in this deep guilt she perseveres and glories!—Can I forget?—Fear me not, nor rank my defeat among things possible—Be patient and lend an ear.
To one sole object all my efforts point: her mind must be prepared, ay so that when the question shall be put, chaste as that mind is, it scarcely shall receive a shock. Such is the continual tendency of my discourse. Her own open and undisguised manners are my guide. Not a principle she maintains but which, by my cunning questions and affected doubts pushed to an extreme,

adds links to the chain in which I mean to lead her captive.
Perhaps, Fairfax, you will tell me this is the old artifice; and that the minds of all women, who can be said to have any mind, must thus be inveigled to think lightly of the thing they are about to lose. Granted. And yet the difference is infinite. They are brought to think thus lightly of chastity: but, should you or any one of the gallant phalanx attempt to make Anna St. Ives so think, she would presently cry buzz to the dull blockhead, and give him his eternal dismission.
Virtue with her is a real existence, and as such must be adored. Her passions are her slaves; and in this and

this alone the lovely tyrant is the advocate of despotism. She soon taught me that common arts would be treated by her, not merely with determined and irrevocable repulse, but with direct contempt. Some very feeble essays presently satisfied me. No encroachments of the touch, no gloting of the eye, no well feigned tremblings and lover's palpitations would for an instant be suffered by her. Take the following as a specimen of my mode of attack.
Among her variety of hypotheses she has one on mutability.
Little, she says, as we know of matter and spirit, we still know enough to perceive they are both instantaneously, eternally, and infinitely changing. Of what the world has been, through this series of

never beginning never ending mutation, she can form nothing more than conjecture: yet she cannot but think that the golden age is a supposition treated at present with ridicule it does not deserve. By the laws of necessity, mind, unless counteracted by accidents beyond its control, is continually progressive in improvement. With some such accidents we are tolerably well acquainted. Such are those which have