Our fortune was equally suitable, so that we meet without any
of those obligations, which always produce reproach or suspicion of
reproach, which, though they may be forgotten in the gaities of the
first month, no delicacy will always suppress, or of which the
suppression must be considered as a new favour, to be repaid by tameness
and submission, till gratitude takes the place of love, and the desire
of pleasing degenerates by degrees into the fear of offending.
The settlements caused no delay; for we did not trust our affairs to the
negociation of wretches, who would have paid their court by multiplying
stipulations. Tranquilla scorned to detain any part of her fortune from
him into whose hands she delivered up her person; and Hymenaeus thought
no act of baseness more criminal than his who enslaves his wife by her
own generosity, who by marrying without a jointure, condemns her to all
the dangers of accident and caprice, and at last boasts his liberality,
by granting what only the indiscretion of her kindness enabled him to
withhold. He therefore received on the common terms the portion which
any other woman might have brought him, and reserved all the exuberance
of acknowledgment for those excellencies which he has yet been able to
discover only in Tranquilla.
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