When I recover’d my senses, I found myself undress’d and a-bed, in the arms of the sweet relenting murderer of my virginity, who hung mourning tenderly over me, and holding in his hand a cordial, which, coming from the still dear author of so much pain, I could not refuse; my eyes, however, moisten’d with tears and languishingly turn’d upon him, seemed to reproach him with his cruelty, and ask him if such were the rewards of love. But Charles, to whom I was now infinitely endear’d by this complete triumph over a maidenhead, where he so little expected to find one, in tenderness to that pain which he had put me to in procuring himself the height of pleasure, smother’d his exultation and employ’d himself with so much sweetness, so much warmth, to soothe, to caress and comfort me in my soft complainings, which breath’d indeed, more love than resentment, that I presently drown’d all sense of pain in the pleasure of seeing him, of thinking that I belong’d to him: he who was now the absolute disposer of my happiness, and, in one word, my fate.
The sore was, however, too tender, the wound too bleeding fresh, for Charles’s good nature to put my patience presently to another trial; but as I could not stir, or walk across the room, he order’d the dinner to be brought to the bedside, where it could not be otherwise than my getting down the wing of a fowl, and two or three glasses of wine, since it was my ador’d youth who both serv’d, and urged them on me, with that sweet irresistible authority with which love had invested him over me.
After dinner, and as everything but the wine was taken away, Charles very impudently asks a leave he might read the grant of in my eyes, to come to bed with me, and accordingly falls to undressing; which I could not see the progress of without strange emotions of fear and pleasure.
He is now in bed with me the first time, and in broad day; but when thrusting up his own shirt and my shift he laid his naked glowing body to mine…Oh! insupportable delight! Oh! superhuman rapture! What pain could stand before a pleasure so transporting? I felt no more the smart of my wounds below; but, curling round him like the tendril of a vine, as if I fear’d any part of him should be untouch’d or unpress’d by me, I return’d his strenuous embraces and kisses with a fervour and gusto only known to true love, and which mere lust could never rise to.
Yes, even at this time, when all the tyranny of the passions is fully over and my veins run no longer with ought but a cold tranquil stream, the remembrance of those passages that most affected me in my youth still cheers and refreshes me. Let me proceed then. My beauteous youth was now glew’d to me in all the folds and twists that we could make our bodies meet in; when, no longer able to rein in the fierceness of refresh’d desires, he gives his steed the head, and, gently insinuating his thighs between mine, stopping my mouth with kisses of humid fire, makes a fresh irruption, and renewing his thrusts, pierces, tears, and forces his way up the torn tender folds, that yielded him admission with a pain little less severe than when the breach was first made. I stifled, however, my cries, and bore him with the passive fortitude of a heroine; soon his thrusts, more and more furious, cheeks flush’d with a deeper scarlet, his eyes turn’d up in the fervent fit, some dying sighs, and an agonising shudder, announced the approaches of that ecstatic pleasure, I was yet in too much pain to come in for my share of it.
Nor was it till after a few enjoyments had numb’d and blunted the sense of the pain, and given me to feel the titillating inspersion of balsamic sweets, drawn from me the delicious return and brought down all my passion, that I arrived at excess of pleasure through excess of pain. But when successive engagements had broke and inur’d me, I began to enter into the true unallay’d relish of that pleasure of pleasures, when the warm gush darts through all the ravish’d inwards; what floods of bliss! what melting transport! what agonies of delight! too fierce, too mighty for nature to sustain; well has she therefore, no doubt, provided the relief of a delicious momentary dissolution, the approaches of which are intimated by a dear delirium, a sweet thrill, on the point of emitting those liquid sweets in which enjoyment itself is drown’d, when one gives the languishing stretch-out and dies at the discharge.
How often, when the rage and tumult of my sense had subsided after the melting flow, have I, in a tender meditation, ask’d myself coolly the question, if it was in nature for any of its creatures to be so happy as I was? Or, what were all fears of the consequence, put in the scale of one night’s enjoyment of anything so transcendently the taste of my eyes and heart as that delicious, fond, matchless youth?
Thus we spent the whole afternoon till suppertime, in a continued circle of love delights, kissing, turtle-billing, toying, and all the rest of the feast. At length, supper was serv’d in, before which Charles had, for I do not know what reason, slipt his clothes on; and sitting down by the bedside, we made table and tablecloth of the bed and sheets, whilst he suffer’d nobody to attend or serve but himself. He ate with a very good appetite, and seem’d charm’d to see me eat. For my part, I was so enchanted with my fortune, so transported with the comparison of the delights I now swam in with the insipidity of all my past scenes of life, that I thought them sufficiently cheap at even the price of my ruin, or the risk of their not lasting. The present possession was all my little head could find room for.
We lay together that night, when, after playing repeated prizes of pleasure, nature, overspent and satisfy’d, gave us up to the arms of sleep: those of my dear youth encircled me, the consciousness of which made even that sleep more delicious.
Late in the morning I wak’d first; and observing my lover slept profoundly, softly disengag’d myself from his arms, scarcely daring to breathe for fear of shortening his repose; my cap, my hair, my shift, were all in disorder from the rufflings I had undergone and I took this opportunity to adjust and set them as well as I could: whilst, every now and then, looking at the sleeping youth, with inconceivable fondness and delight, and reflecting on all the pain he had put me to, I tacitly own’d that the pleasure had overpaid me for my sufferings.
It was then broad day. I was sitting up in the bed, the clothes of which were all tossed, or rolled off, by the unquietness of our motions and from the sultry heat of the weather; nor could I refuse myself a pleasure that solicited me so irresistibly, as this fair occasion of feasting my sight with all those treasures of youthful beauty I had enjoy’d, and which lay now almost entirely naked, his shirt being truss’d up in a perfect wisp, which the warmth of the room and season made me easy about the consequence of. I hung over him enamour’d indeed! and devoured all his naked charms with only two eyes, when I could have wish’d them at least a hundred, for the fuller enjoyment of the gaze.
Oh! could I paint his figure as I see it now, still present to my transported imagination! a whole length of an all-perfect, manly beauty in full view. Think of a face without a fault, glowing with all the opening bloom and vernal freshness of an age in which beauty is of either sex, and which the first down