“I think you do commit yourself, Lizzie, when you put pen to paper to answer a stranger’s letter, and when you cannot tell whether he is true or false. More likely he is the latter, from the very fact of his trying to draw you on. How do you know how he may use your letter?”
“But I haven’t signed my name, only my own initials. I use E. L., not L. L. And you know I am known rather as Lizzie Lennox than Elizabeth Lennox. No one ever thinks of me as Elizabeth—I don’t seem to be that to myself. Now, you are either Elinor or Elly, but I am just Lizzie. So you see I can hide under my own honest initials.”
“Ah Lizzie! why hide at all? Give it up. I don’t like this kind of thing. I don’t believe the men who write to girls in this way care one bit for them, except to make them contribute to their own amusement, and feed their conceit. What good does it do when you don’t even see each other?”
“But we may, after, if we want to, you know.”
“I shouldn’t want to see him, Lizzie; I hope you will never meet.”
“Now, Elly, it is just being with those sisters that makes you talk so.
Why, all the girls do so. It is only for fun, and the young men know we don’t mean wrong. I could say ‘Evil he who evil thinks,’ only I know you are not evil, only sisterified in this matter.”
“But, Lizzie, sisterified or not, you know I like fun as much as other girls, only I don’t think this is fun: I think it isn’t just right. It is making yourself too cheap. I don’t like men well enough to do so much for their amusement. I may be peculiar, but I certainly hate a covert thing, and personals in the newspapers are very covert and very cowardly. Mamma says a respectable paper will not publish them. Besides, you dare not let your father and mother know this, dare you?”
“Oh! of course they would get a great scare, and think I was going to do something much worse than I mean. But that doesn’t prove I would do wrong.”
“No; but, Lizzie, don’t you hate to deceive them when they trust you so freely? Is this stranger to be trusted and they not?”