The Fortunes and Misfortunes of the Famous Moll Flanders

I had now such a load on my mind that it kept me perpetually waking; to

reveal it, which would have been some ease to me, I could not find

would be to any purpose, and yet to conceal it would be next to

impossible; nay, I did not doubt but I should talk of it in my sleep,

and tell my husband of it whether I would or no. If I discovered it,

the least thing I could expect was to lose my husband, for he was too

nice and too honest a man to have continued my husband after he had

known I had been his sister; so that I was perplexed to the last degree.

I leave it to any man to judge what difficulties presented to my view.

I was away from my native country, at a distance prodigious, and the

return to me unpassable. I lived very well, but in a circumstance

insufferable in itself. If I had discovered myself to my mother, it

might be difficult to convince her of the particulars, and I had no way

to prove them. On the other hand, if she had questioned or doubted me,

I had been undone, for the bare suggestion would have immediately

separated me from my husband, without gaining my mother or him, who

would have been neither a husband nor a brother; so that between the

surprise on one hand, and the uncertainty on the other, I had been sure

to be undone.

In the meantime, as I was but too sure of the fact, I lived therefore

in open avowed incest and whoredom, and all under the appearance of an

honest wife; and though I was not much touched with the crime of it,

yet the action had something in it shocking to nature, and made my

husband, as he thought himself, even nauseous to me.

However, upon the most sedate consideration, I resolved that it was

absolutely necessary to conceal it all and not make the least discovery

of it either to mother or husband; and thus I lived with the greatest

pressure imaginable for three years more, but had no more children.

During this time my mother used to be frequently telling me old stories

of her former adventures, which, however, were no ways pleasant to me;

for by it, though she did not tell it me in plain terms, yet I could

easily understand, joined with what I had heard myself, of my first

tutors, that in her younger days she had been both whore and thief; but

I verily believed she had lived to repent sincerely of both, and that

she was then a very pious, sober, and religious woman.