But this is what I am ready to conjecture, that Tomlinson, specious as he is, is a machine of Love- >>> lace; and that he is employed for some end, which has not yet been answered. This is certain, that not only Tomlinson, but Mennell, who, I think, attended you more than once at this vile house, must know it to be a vile house.
What can you then think of Tomlinson's declar- ing himself in favour of it upon inquiry?
Lovelace too must know it to be so; if not before he brought you to it, soon after.
>>> Perhaps the company he found there, may be the most probable way of accounting for his bearing with the house, and for his strange suspensions of marriage, when it was in his power to call such an angel of a woman his.--
>>> O my dear, the man is a villain!--the greatest of villains, in every light!--I am convinced that he is.--And this Doleman must be another of his implements!
>>> There are so many wretches who think that to be no sin, which is one of the greatest and most ungrateful of all sins,--to ruin young creatures of our sex who place their confidence in them; that the wonder is less than the shame, that people, of appearance at least, are found to promote the horrid purposes of profligates of fortune and interest!
>>> But can I think [you will ask with indignant astonishment] that Lovelace can have designs upon your honour?
>>> That such designs he has had, if he still hold them or not, I can have no doubt, now that I know the house he has brought you to, to be a vile one. This is a clue that has led me to account for all his behaviour to you ever since you have been in his hands.
Allow me a brief retrospection of it all.
We both know, that pride, revenge, and a delight to tread in unbeaten paths, are principal ingredients in the character of this finished libertine.
>>> He hates all your family--yourself excepted: and I have several times thought, that I have seen >>> him stung and mortified that love has obliged him to kneel at your footstool, because you are a Har- lowe. Yet is this wretch a savage in love.--Love >>> that humanizes the fiercest spirits, has not been able to subdue his. His pride, and the credit which a >>> few plausible qualities, sprinkled among his odious ones, have given him, have secured him too good a reception from our eye-judging, our undistinguish- ing, our self-flattering, our too-confiding sex, to make assiduity and obsequiousness, and a conquest of his unruly passions, any part of his study.