When an innocent girl of this open, trusting, tender heart, happens to meet with one of her own sex and age, whose address and manners are engaging, she is instantly seized with an ardent desire to commence a friendship with her. She feels the most lively impatience at the restraint of company and the decorums of ceremony.—She longs to be alone with her—longs to assure her of the warmth of her tenderness, and generally ascribes to the fair stranger all the good qualities she feels in her own heart, or rather all those which she has met with in her reading, dispersed in a variety of heroines.—She is persuaded that her new friend unites them all in herself, because the carries in her prepossessing countenance the promise of them all.
If hints of her defects are given, she mistakes the voice of discretion. At first she listens to them with a generous impatience, and afterwards with a cold and silent disdain, and despises them as the effect of prejudice, misrepresentation, or ignorance.
Yet this trusting confidence, this honest indiscretion, is, at this early period of life, as amiable as it is natural; and will, if wisely cultivated, produce at its proper season, fruits infinitely more valuable than all the guarded circumspection of premature, and therefore artificial prudence. Nay, if the younger part of the sex are sometimes deceived in the choice of a friend, they enjoy even then an higher degree of satisfaction than if they never trusted—For to be always clad in the burthensome armour of suspicion is more painful and inconvenient, than to run the hazard of suffering, now and then, a transient injury.
These observations chiefly respect the inexperienced; for it is a certainty that women are capable of as faithful and as durable friendship as any of the other sex. They can enter not only into all the enthusiastic tenderness, but into all the solid fidelity of attachment.
RIDICULE.
The fatal fondness for indulging a spirit of ridicule, and the injurious and irreparable consequences which sometimes attend the too severe reply, can never be condemned with more asperity than it deserves. Not to offend is the first step towards pleasing. To give pain is as much an offence against humanity as against good-breeding; and surely it is as well to abstain from an action because it is sinful, as because it is impolite.
A man of sense and breeding will sometimes join in the laugh, which has been raised at his expence by an ill natured repartee; but if it was very cutting, and one of those shocking sorts of truths, which, as they scarcely can be pardoned even in private, ought never to be uttered in public, he does not laugh because he wishes to conceal how much he is hurt; and will remember it, as a treat of malice, when the whole company should have forgotten it as a stroke of ridicule.
Even women are so far from being privileged by their sex to say unhandsome or cruel things, that it is this very circumstance which renders them intolerable. When the arrow is lodged in the heart, it is no relief to him who is wounded to reflect, that the hand which shot it was a fair one.