Then, how rapidly did my fancy teem with plan and project! How did I reject one, choose another! Till, at length, I called for light and paper, that I might cool the fever of my hopes, by laying them bare to your inspection. I well know what you are, Walter: a compound of contradictions. When you should believe, you are sceptical; where you should doubt, your faith is unshaken; and I expect when I tell you I am more and more convinced, by the recollection of many circumstances and by the Earl's awkward evasions, that Miss Valmont is her father's heiress--I expect, I say, that you will assure me I am deceived: and, as to my resolution of stealing her, you will assert that it is a project idle, vain, and impracticable. Yet, were I now to abandon the enterprise, you would wonder at my stupidity, would declare nothing could appear so certain as her fortune, and nothing so easy as its attainment. Therefore, dear Walter, I do not ask your advice; I only ask your attention. Six or seven thousand a year! The lady a minor too from the age of six, and no expences incurred upon her education!--Think of these circumstances, Walter; and, if you love arithmetic, cast up the accumulations of all these years; and to make the sum total of my future possessions, add the 10,000l. per ann. of her uncle who never had any other heir than this untutored Sibella! Would not such a sum convert even deformity into grace? But they say too she has beauty. Her ignorance and barbarism I will forgive; for I can at all times escape from a wife, though I cannot escape from the debts which are hourly accumulating to my destruction. Marry a fortune or fly my country: there's the alternative. I choose the former. As to flying one's country, I know of no country in which a man may drink, game, &c. &c. and spend his own and other people's money so easily as in that where, being born rather of one parent than another, the delightful privilege becomes as it were part of his legal inheritance.