Else how would it
have been forgiveness? especially as she was ashamed of her crime, and
there was no fear of her repeating it.
Thus then I thought on the occasion: "Poor wretched agent, for
purposes little less than infernal! I _will_ forgive thee, since _thy_
master and _my_ master will have it so. And indeed thou art beneath
the resentment even of such a poor girl as I. I will _pity_ thee,
base and abject as thou art. And she who is the object of my _pity_ is
surely beneath my _anger_."
Such were then my thoughts, my proud thoughts, so far was I from
being guilty of _intentional_ meanness in forgiving, at Mr. B.'s
interposition, the poor, low, creeping, abject _self_-mortified, and
_master_-mortified, Mrs. Jewkes.
And do you think, ladies, when you revolve in your thoughts, _who_ I
was, and _what_ I was, and what I had been _designed_ for; when you
revolve the amazing turn in my favour, and the prospects before me (so
much above my hopes, that I left them entirely to Providence to direct
for me, as it pleased, without daring to look forward to what those
prospects seemed naturally to tend); when I could see my haughty
persecutor become my repentant protector; the lofty spirit that used
to make me tremble, and to which I never could look up without awe,
except in those animating cases, where his guilty attempts, and the
concern I had to preserve my innocence, gave a courage more than
natural to my otherwise dastardly heart: when this impetuous spirit
could stoop to request one whom he had sunk beneath even her usual low
character of his servant, who was his prisoner, under sentence of a
ruin worse than death, as he had intended it, and had seized her for
that very purpose, could stoop to acknowledge the vileness of that
purpose; could say, at one time, that my forgiveness of Mrs.
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