It was a
substantial, instructive book that I had bought, by the late Dr.
Heineccius, in which I was to do a great deal reading these next
few days, and often very glad that I had no one to question me of
what I read. Methought she bit her lip at me a little, and that
cut me. Indeed it left her wholly solitary, the more as she was
very little of a reader, and had never a book. But what was I to
do?
So the rest of the evening flowed by almost without speech.
I could have beat myself. I could not lie in my bed that night for
rage and repentance, but walked to and fro on my bare feet till I
was nearly perished, for the chimney was gone out and the frost
keen. The thought of her in the next room, the thought that she
might even hear me as I walked, the remembrance of my churlishness
and that I must continue to practise the same ungrateful course or
be dishonoured, put me beside my reason. I stood like a man
between Scylla and Charybdis: WHAT MUST SHE THINK OF ME? was my
one thought that softened me continually into weakness. WHAT IS TO
BECOME OF US? the other which steeled me again to resolution.
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