The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

However, I kept myself safe yet, though I began, like my Lord

Rochester's mistress, that loved his company, but would not admit him

farther, to have the scandal of a whore, without the joy; and upon this

score, tired with the place, and indeed with the company too, I began

to think of removing.

It was indeed a subject of strange reflection to me to see men who were

overwhelmed in perplexed circumstances, who were reduced some degrees

below being ruined, whose families were objects of their own terror and

other people's charity, yet while a penny lasted, nay, even beyond it,

endeavouring to drown themselves, labouring to forget former things,

which now it was the proper time to remember, making more work for

repentance, and sinning on, as a remedy for sin past.

But it is none of my talent to preach; these men were too wicked, even

for me. There was something horrid and absurd in their way of sinning,

for it was all a force even upon themselves; they did not only act

against conscience, but against nature; they put a rape upon their

temper to drown the reflections, which their circumstances continually

gave them; and nothing was more easy than to see how sighs would

interrupt their songs, and paleness and anguish sit upon their brows,

in spite of the forced smiles they put on; nay, sometimes it would

break out at their very mouths when they had parted with their money

for a lewd treat or a wicked embrace. I have heard them, turning

about, fetch a deep sigh, and cry, 'What a dog am I! Well, Betty, my

dear, I'll drink thy health, though'; meaning the honest wife, that

perhaps had not a half-crown for herself and three or four children.

The next morning they are at their penitentials again; and perhaps the

poor weeping wife comes over to him, either brings him some account of

what his creditors are doing, and how she and the children are turned

out of doors, or some other dreadful news; and this adds to his

self-reproaches; but when he has thought and pored on it till he is

almost mad, having no principles to support him, nothing within him or

above him to comfort him, but finding it all darkness on every side, he

flies to the same relief again, viz. to drink it away, debauch it away,

and falling into company of men in just the same condition with

himself, he repeats the crime, and thus he goes every day one step

onward of his way to destruction.

I was not wicked enough for such fellows as these yet. On the

contrary, I began to consider here very seriously what I had to do; how

things stood with me, and what course I ought to take. I knew I had no

friends, no, not one friend or relation in the world; and that little I

had left apparently wasted, which when it was gone, I saw nothing but

misery and starving was before me. Upon these considerations, I say,

and filled with horror at the place I was in, and the dreadful objects

which I had always before me, I resolved to be gone.