The female thermometer eighteenth centur 67

C H A P T E R LOVELACE'S DREAM ne week after Clarissa has been drugged and raped, has fallen into madness and out of it, she begins to plot She meditates an escape—from Mrs Sinclair's brothel and from Lovelace Her plot involves bribing Dorcas the servant with an offer of future rewards if she will help her get away Dorcas, hypocritically agreeable, immediately informs Lovelace, who is put on his guard The tricky servant confirms his maxim, repeated for Belford, that "the bond of wickedness is a stronger bond than the ties of virtue" (III, 247).l Yet the vision of his "charmer" "plotting" to escape lingers too in his imagination and excites him So confident is he of his control over Clarissa he toys with the idea of letting her escape on purpose, simply in order to recapture her and thus demonstrate once more his ineluctable power over her He half-hopes also to force her by this means into that marriage which he now claims, almost convincing himself, he wants with her "I cannot live without intrigue," he writes to Belford And of Clarissa he adds, with mock-portentousness, "She is now authorizing all my plots by her own example" (243) At precisely this moment in the fiction Lovelace has a waking dream In this daytime "reverie," which he describes to Belford in one of his June 20 letters, Clarissa does in fact escape him, or seem to "Methought," he writes, "that a O 56