that could be agreeable; only had unhappily had some drink
the night before, had not been in bed, as he told me when we
were together; was hot, and his blood fired with wine, and in
that condition his reason, as it were asleep, had given him up.
As for me, my business was his money, and what I could make
of him; and after that, if I could have found out any way to
have done it, I would have sent him safe home to his house
and to his family, for ’twas ten to one but he had an honest,
virtuous wife and innocent children, that were anxious for his
safety, and would have been glad to have gotten him home,
and have taken care of him till he was restored to himself.
And then with what shame and regret would he look back
upon himself! how would he reproach himself with associating
himself with a whore! picked up in the worst of all holes, the
cloister, among the dirt and filth of all the town! how would
he be trembling for fear he had got the pox, for fear a dart had
struck through his liver, and hate himself every time he looked
back upon the madness and brutality of his debauch! how
would he, if he had any principles of honour, as I verily believe
he had–I say, how would he abhor the thought of giving any
ill distemper, if he had it, as for aught he knew he might, to
his modest and virtuous wife, and thereby sowing the contagion
in the life-blood of his prosterity.
Would such gentlemen but consider the contemptible thoughts
which the very women they are concerned with, in such cases
as these, have of them, it would be a surfeit to them. As I
said above, they value not the pleasure, they are raised by no
inclination to the man, the passive jade thinks of no pleasure
but the money; and when he is, as it were, drunk in the
ecstasies of his wicked pleasure, her hands are in his pockets
searching for what she can find there, and of which he can no
more be sensible in the moment of his folly that he can forethink
of it when he goes about it.
I knew a woman that was so dexterous with a fellow, who
indeed deserved no better usage, that while he was busy with
her another way, conveyed his purse with twenty guineas in
it out of his fob-pocket, where he had put it for fear of her,
and put another purse with gilded counters in it into the room
of it. After he had done, he says to her, ‘Now han’t you picked
my pocket?’ She jested with him, and told him she supposed
he had not much to lose; he put his hand to his fob, and with
his fingers felt that his purse was there, which fully satisfied
him, and so she brought off his money. And this was a trade
with her; she kept a sham gold watch, that is, a watch of silver
gilt, and a purse of counters in her pocket to be ready on all
such occasions, and I doubt not practiced it with success.
I came home with this last booty to my governess, and really
when I told her the story, it so affected her that she was hardly
able to forbear tears, to know how such a gentleman ran a
daily risk of being undone every time a glass of wine got into
his head.
But as to the purchase I got, and how entirely I stripped him,
she told me it please her wonderfully. ‘Nay child,’ says she,
‘the usage may, for aught I know, do more to reform him than
all the sermons that ever he will hear in his life.’ And if the
remainder of the story be true, so it did.
I found the next day she was wonderful inquisitive about this
gentleman; the description I had given her of him, his dress,
his person, his face, everything concurred to make her think
of a gentleman whose character she knew, and family too.
She mused a while, and I going still on with the particulars,