Puffy heaven in this beachside amateur
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure)
Letter The First
A sketch of her picture, and personal history, will dispose you to account for the part she is to act in my concerns. She was about forty-six years old, tall, meagre, redhair'd, with one of those trivial ordinary faces you meet with everywhere, and go about unheeded and unmentioned. In her youth she had been kept by a gentleman who, dying, left her forty pounds a year during her life, in consideration of a daughter he had by her; which daughter, at the age of seven-teen, she sold, for not a very considerable sum neither, to a gentleman who was going on Envoy abroad, and took his purchase with him, where he us'd her with the utmost tenderness, and it is thought, was secretly married to her: but had constantly made a point of her not keeping up the least correspondence with a mother base enough to make a market of her own flesh and blood. However, as she had no nature, nor, indeed, any passion but that of money, this gave her no further uneasiness, than, as she thereby lost a handle of squeezing presents, or other after-advantages, out of the bargain ...
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