The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

But this was not all; she very ingeniously managed another thing

herself, for she got a young gentleman, who as a relation, and was

indeed a married man, to come and visit her two or three times a week

in a very fine chariot and good liveries, and her two agents, and I

also, presently spread a report all over, that this gentleman came to

court her; that he was a gentleman of a #1000 a year, and that he was

fallen in love with her, and that she was going to her aunt's in the

city, because it was inconvenient for the gentleman to come to her with

his coach in Redriff, the streets being so narrow and difficult.

This took immediately. The captain was laughed at in all companies,

and was ready to hang himself. He tried all the ways possible to come

at her again, and wrote the most passionate letters to her in the

world, excusing his former rashness; and in short, by great

application, obtained leave to wait on her again, as he said, to clear

his reputation.

At this meeting she had her full revenge of him; for she told him she

wondered what he took her to be, that she should admit any man to a

treaty of so much consequence as that to marriage, without inquiring

very well into his circumstances; that if he thought she was to be

huffed into wedlock, and that she was in the same circumstances which

her neighbours might be in, viz. to take up with the first good

Christian that came, he was mistaken; that, in a word, his character

was really bad, or he was very ill beholden to his neighbours; and that

unless he could clear up some points, in which she had justly been

prejudiced, she had no more to say to him, but to do herself justice,

and give him the satisfaction of knowing that she was not afraid to say

No, either to him or any man else.

With that she told him what she had heard, or rather raised herself by

my means, of his character; his not having paid for the part he

pretended to own of the ship he commanded; of the resolution of his

owners to put him out of the command, and to put his mate in his stead;

and of the scandal raised on his morals; his having been reproached

with such-and-such women, and having a wife at Plymouth and in the West

Indies, and the like; and she asked him whether he could deny that she

had good reason, if these things were not cleared up, to refuse him,

and in the meantime to insist upon having satisfaction in points to

significant as they were.