He wishes, 'that the Lady would have accepted of his draught; and
commends me for tendering it to her. But reproaches me for my pride in
not keeping it myself. What the right side gives up, the left, he says,
may be the better for.'
The girls, the left-sided girls, he means.
With all my heart. If I can have my Clarissa, the devil take every thing
else.
A good deal of other stuff writes the stupid peer; scribbling in several
places half a dozen lines, apparently for no other reason but to bring in
as many musty words in an old saw.
If thou sawest, 'How I can manage, since my beloved will wonder that I
have not an answer from my Lord to such a letter as I wrote to him; and
if I own I have one, will expect that I should shew it to her, as I did
my letter?--This I answer--'That I can be informed by Pritchard, that my
Lord has the gout in his right-hand; and has ordered him to attend me in
form, for my particular orders about the transfer:' And I can see
Pritchard, thou knowest, at the King's Arms, or wherever I please, at an
hour's warning; though he be at M. Hall, I in town; and he, by word of
mouth, can acquaint me with every thing in my Lord's letter that is
necessary for my charmer to know.
Whenever it suits me, I can resolve the old peer to his right hand, and
then can make him write a much more sensible letter than this that he has
now sent me.
Thou knowest, that an adroitness in the art of manual imitation, was one
of my earliest attainments. It has been said, on this occasion, that had
I been a bad man in meum and tuum matters, I should not have been fit to
live. As to the girls, we hold it no sin to cheat them. And are we not
told, that in being well deceived consists the whole of human happiness?