What a time was it that I chose for an injury so atrocious! A beautiful and most amiable woman had just been deprived, by an unforeseen event, of that husband, with whom but a little before she had entered into the most sacred engagements. The state of a widow is always an afflictive and unprotected one. Rank does not soften, frequently aggravates the calamity. A tragedy had just been acted, that rendered the name of Matilda the butt of common fame, the subject of universal discussion. How painful and humiliating must this situation have been to that anxious and trembling mind; a mind whose highest ambition coveted only the tranquility that reigns in the shade of retreat, the silence and obscurity that the wisest of philosophers have asserted to be the most valuable reputation of her sex? Such was the affliction, in which I might then have known that the mistress of my heart was involved.
But I have since learned a circumstance before which all other aggravations of my inhumanity fade away. The moment that I chose for wanton insult and groundless arraignment, was the very moment in which Matilda discovered all the horrid train of hypocrisy and falsehood by which she had been betrayed. What a shock must it have given to her gentle and benevolent mind, that had never been conscious to one vicious temptation, that had never indulged the most distant thought of malignity, to have found herself surprized into a conduct, to the nature of which she had been a stranger, and which her heart disavowed? Of all the objects of compassion that the universe can furnish, there is none more truly affecting, than that of an artless and unsuspecting mind insnared by involuntary guilt. The astonishment with which it is overwhelmed, is vast and unqualified. The remorse with which it is tortured, are totally unprepared and unexpected, and have been introduced by no previous gradation. It is true, the involuntarily culpable may in some sense be pronounced wholly innocent. The guilty mind is full of prompt excuses, and ready evasions, but the untainted spirit, not inured to the sophistry of vice, cannot accommodate itself with these subterfuges. If such be the state of vulgar minds involved in this unfortunate situation, what must have been that of so soft and inoffensive a spirit?