Backdraft: Linda
Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure)
Letter The Second
But it was not so easy to replace to our community the loss of so sweet a member of it: for, not to mention her beauty, she was one of those mild, pliant characters that if one does not entirely esteem, one can scarce help loving, which is not such a bad compensation neither. Owing all her weakness to good-nature, and an indolent facility that kept her too much at the mercy of first impressions, she had just sense enough to know that she wanted leading-strings, and thought herself so much obliged to any who would take the pains to think for her, and guide her, that with a very little management, she was capable of being made a most agreeable, nay, a most virtuous wife: for vice, it is probable, had never been her choice, or her fate, if it had not been for occasion, or example, or had she not depended less upon herself than upon her circumstances. This presumption her conduct afterwards verified: for presently meeting with a match that was ready cut and dry for her, with a neighbour's son of her own rank, and a young man of sense and order, who took her as the widow of one lost at sea (for so it seems one of her gallants, whose name she had made free with, really was), she naturally struck into all the duties of their domestic life with as much constancy and regularity, as if she had never swerv'd from a state of undebauch'd innocence from her youth.
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