ABSTRACT
CELESTINA, though more unwilling than ever to go, had prescribed to herself in her cooler moments a line of conduct, from which, feeling it her duty to adhere to it, she now determined not to depart. In arguing with herself on it’s propriety, and strengthening her faultering resolution, she passed the night. At four o’clock the servant who was commissioned to awaken her, came to her door: she arose and dressed herself by candle light: the morning was cold and dark: every object appeared dreary and forlorn: she hurried on her cloaths however, and endeavoured to drive away every recollection that might enfeeble her spirits too much; but, as she passed the door of the dressing room, she remembered that it was there she had seen Willoughby perhaps for the last time, and almost involuntarily she went in, and by the light of her solitary candle, contemplated a whole length picture of him which had just been finished for his sister: the likeness was so strong, that by the wavering and uncertain light that fell upon it, she almost fancied he was about to speak to her: she started at the idea, and feeling a sort of chilly terror at the silence and obscurity of every thing around her, she turned away and hastened to the servant who had prepared her tea in the parlour: she had however hardly time to drink it, before the hackney coach which had been ordered the night before was at the door; and having seen what little baggage she had not before sent put into it, she stepped in herself, and was soon at a distance from the residence of Mrs. Molyneux, from the friend of her early years, and was launched alone and unprotected into a world of which she had yet seen nothing but through the favourable medium lent by affluence and prosperity to those who from thence contemplate difficulties they are never likely to encounter and calamities they probably never can participate.
