Barbara Alton, red-painted fingernail to cheek

Fanny Hill (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure)

Letter The Second

... Amidst however, this crowd of ideas, and all blissful ones, there obtruded only one cruel doubt, that poison'd nearly all the transcendent happiness: and what was it, but my dread of its being too excessive to be real? I trembled now with the fear of its being no more than a dream, and of my waking out of it into the horrors of finding it one. Under this fond apprehension, imagining I could not make too much of the present prodigious joy, before it should vanish and leave me in the desert again, nor verify its reality too strongly, I clung to him, I clasp'd him, as if to hinder him from escaping me again: "Where have you been? . . . how could you . . . could you leave me? . . . Say you are still mine . . . that you still love me . . . and thus! thus!" (kissing him as if I would consolidate lips with him!) "I forgive you . . . forgive my hard fortune in favour of this restoration."

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