Memoirs of Fanny Hill: A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749)Cleland, John
General
Memoirs of Fanny Hill: A New and Genuine Edition from the Original Text (London, 1749)
Cleland, John
England -- Fiction; Erotic fiction; Prostitutes -- Fiction
Martha, who was an arch-jade, and, being used to this decoy, had her
cue perfect, made me a kind of half curtsy, and asked me to walk up
with her; and accordingly showed me a neat room, two pair of stairs
backwards, in which there was a handsome bed, where Martha told me I
was to lie with a young gentlewoman, a cousin of my mistress, who she
was sure would be vastly good to me. Then she ran out into such
affected encomiums on her good mistress! her sweet mistress! and how
happy I was to light upon her! and that I could not have bespoke a
better; with other the like gross stuff, such as would itself have
started suspicions in any but such an unpractised simpleton, who was
perfectly new to life, and who took every word she said in the very
sense she laid out for me to take it; but she readily saw what a
penetration she had to deal with, and measured me very rightly in her
manner of whistling to me, so as to make me pleased with my cage, and
blind to the wires.
In the midst of these false explanations of the nature of my future
service, we were rung for down again, and I was reintroduced into the
same parlour, where there was a table laid with three covers; and my
mistress had now got with her one of her favourite girls, a notable
manager of her house, and whose business it was to prepare and break
such young fillies as I was to the mounting block; and she was
accordingly, in that view, alloted me for a bed-fellow, and, to give
her the more authority, she had the title of cousin conferred on her by
the venerable president of this college.
Here I underwent a second survey, which ended in the full approbation
of Mrs. Phœbe Ayres, the name of my tutoress elect, to whose care and
instruction I was affectionately recommended.
Dinner was now set on table, and in pursuance of treating me as a
companion, Mrs. Brown, with a tone to cut off all dispute, soon
over-ruled my most humble and most confused protestations against
sitting down with her Ladyship, which my very short breeding just
suggested to me could not be right, or in the order of things.
At table, the conversation was chiefly kept up by the two madams and
carried on in double meaning expressions, interrupted every now and
then by kind assurances to me, all tending to confirm and fix my
satisfaction with my present condition: augment it they could not, so
very a novice was I then.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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