Certainly, my dear, my head is a little disordered. I am unquiet, agitated: I count the hours, the moments; Time seems to me uncommonly long. I expect, without knowing what I expect. The least noise sets me a trembling; if my door opens, my heart beats. Every time my servants pass in or out of my apartment, I look at them with eyes which seem to require something of them: I hear a tedious repetition of, what would my Lady have? – Ah! Good God! Your Lady knows not what she would have – Can you divine, my dearest Henrietta, the cause of all this emotion? O how low, how mean, how shameful is it! – It is the expectation of an answer – No, I cannot suffer myself to betray such weakness.

I wish to leave this place, to fly from so dangerous a neighbourhood: yet if my Lord Ossory is determined to see me, to speak to me, where can I be secure against this obstinate resolution? He will find a way to satisfy it; he may obtain from chance, perhaps from my weakness, the conversation he so pressingly demands: are men ever weary of any pursuit in which their caprice engages them? They are never humbled by our repulses; this is one of the advantages they reserve to themselves. Has a woman the misfortune to love, to love too tenderly? Does she grow weary of her lover? What reproaches, what persecutions is she not obliged to suffer? She may banish him; but he returns, he seeks her every where, he pursues her; he complains, threatens, beseeches, sighs, abandons himself to his passion; being heard, is a consolation he will not refuse himself. He is very little anxious, whether this conduct gives uneasiness or disgust: his soul is not delicate enough to be wounded by the idea of becoming importunate. Attentive to himself only, nothing can make him renounce a good of which he flatters himself with the possession; and often, by the force of obstinacy, he obtains, if not the heart, at least the person, the strongest object of his attachment.