(What a pity the Great Mrs. "Justice" Spywell could not hear these
terrible and unmaidenly sentiments! An adventuress of the
"fishing-fleet" in very truth!)

And with reproving smile the gentle spinster would reply:--

"My _dear!_ Suppose anyone overheard you, what _would_ they think?"
Whereunto the naughty girl would answer:--

"The truth, Auntie--that I'm going to pursue some poor young man to
his doom. If Dam were a leper in the gutter, begging his bread, I
would marry him in spite of himself--or share the gutter and bread
in--er--guilty splendour. If he were a criminal in jail I would sit on
the doorstep till he came out, and do the same dreadful thing. I'm
just going to marry Dam at the first possible moment--like the Wild
West 'shoot on sight' idea. I'm going to seize him and marry him and
take care of him for the rest of his life. If he never had another
grief, ache, or pain in the whole of his life, he must have had more
than ten times his share already. Anyhow whether he'll marry me or
whether he won't--in his stupid quixotic ideas of his 'fitness' to do
so--I'm never going to part from him again."

And Auntie Yvette would endeavour to be less shocked than a
right-minded spinster aunt should be at such wild un-Early-Victorian
sentiments.

* * * * *

Come, this was a better sort of dream! This was better than dreaming
of prison-cells, lunatic asylums, tortures by the Snake, lying smashed