Oh!
Sophia, your father hath sent me to you, to be an advocate
for my odious rival, to solicit you in his favor. I took
any means to get access to you. O, speak to me, Sophia!
Comfort my bleeding heart. Sure no one ever loved, ever
doted, like me. Do not unkindly withhold this dear, this
soft, this gentle hand--one moment perhaps tears you
forever from me. Nothing less than this cruel occasion
could, I believe, have ever conquered the respect and love
with which you have inspired me.'
She stood a moment silent, and covered with confusion;
then, lifting up her eyes gently towards him, she cried:
'What would Mr. Jones have me say?'
We would seem to have here a writer not quite in his native
element. He intends to interest us in a serious situation.
Sophia is on the whole natural and winning, although one may
stop to imagine what kind of an agony is that which allows of so
mathematical a division of time as is implied in the statement
that she looked at her lover--tenderly, too, forsooth!--"almost
a minute." The mood of mathematics and the mood of emotion, each
excellent in itself, do not go together in life as they do in
eighteenth century fiction. But in the general impression she
makes, Sophia, let us concede, is sweet and realizable. But
Jones, whom we have long before this scene come to know and be
fond of--Jones is here a prig, a bore, a dummy.
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