CLELAND, John

The Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure / Fanny Hill

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The first object then, that my eyes opened on, was their supreme idol, and my supreme wish, Charles, on one knee, holding me fast by the hand and gazing on me with a transport of fondness. Observing my recovery, he attempted to speak, and give vent to his patience of hearing my voice again, to satisfy him once more that it was I; but the mightiness and suddenness of the surprise continuing to stun him, choked his utterance: he could only stammer out a few broken, half-formed, filtering accents, which my ears greedily drinking in, spelt, and put together, so as to make out their sense: “After so long!... so cruel an absence!... my dearest Fanny!... can it?... can it be you?...” stifling me at the time with kisses, that, stopping my opening mouth, at once prevented the answer that he panted for, and increased the delicious disorder in which all my senses were rapturously lost. However, amidst this crowd of ideas, and all blissful ones, there obtruded only one cruel doubt that poisoned nearly all the transcendant happiness: and what was it, but my dread of its being too excessive to be real? I trembled now with my fear of its being no more than a dream, and of 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 would vanish and leave me in the desert again, nor verify its reality too strongly, I clung to him, I clasped 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 consolidated lips with him) “I forgive you... forgive my hard fortune in favour of this restoration.”

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"I ( Fanny Hill ), struggling faintly, could not help feeling what I could not grasp, a column of the whitest ivory, beautifully streak'd with blue veins, and carrying, fully uncapt, a head of the liveliest vermilion: no horn could be harder or stiffer; yet no velvet more smooth or delicious to the touch. Presently he guided my hand lower, to that part in which nature and pleasure keep their stores in concert, so aptly fasten'd and hung on to the root of their first instrument and minister, that not improperly he might be styl'd their purse-bearer too: there he made me feel distinctly, through their soft cover, the contents, a pair of roundish balls, that seem'd to play within, and elude all pressure but the tenderest, from without.

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