Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/344

 down from her youth, of never showing too much love to the man she had a mind to govern, she so far succeeded in all her schemes that if ever any dispute arose between them, after this scene, it was not without the most servile submissions on her husband's side, and her exerting all the most haughty airs she could think on, that he could ever obtain a reconciliation with her: nor did she think herself at all to blame for such a conduct; but often asserted that, notwithstanding all the complaints of women's levity and coquetry, yet that she thought the man who gives up all his ease and sacrifices all his time to the satisfying a restless ambition and the grasping of power, was just on the same footing with the woman who makes it her study to display and set off her charms in order to gain a general admiration: that the same love of power was the motive of both their actions; and, consequently, that she could not see, if there is so much folly as is said to be in the one, how the other could be exempted from the same imputation. "But here I will leave her, and go back to Sacharissa. Her taste was too good, although she had a great softness in her temper, for her easily to fix her affections; but the man of sense, whom I have already mentioned to you as a lover of Corinna's, touched her heart. She took care to conceal it, because she well knew Corinna would be uneasy at parting with one admirer, although her dislike to him was ever so great. But when Corinna was married, and this gentleman compared her usage of all her lovers with Sacharissa's modest and good-natured behaviour, he fixed his love on the woman who now appeared so much the most deserving. The courtship did not last long; for as she had made it a rule never to conceal her affections from the man she loved longer than she doubted of his, decency was the only thing considered by her; and they were