I flung myself before him on my knees, and with floods of tears besought him to release me from this engagement, assuring him that my cowardice was abject, and that in every point of intellect and character I was his hopeless and derisible inferior.
1885, Robert Louis Stevenson, Fanny Van de Grift Stevenson, “Story of the Destroying Angel”, in More New Arabian Nights: The Dynamiter, London: Longmans, Green, and Co., page 45