This observation is the result of experience; for I have known
several notable women, and one in particular, who was a very good
woman- as good as such a narrow mind would allow her to be, who took
care that her daughters (three in number) should never see a novel. As
she was a woman of fortune and fashion, they had various masters to
attend them, and a sort of menial governess to watch their
footsteps. From their masters they learned how tables, chairs, &c.
were called in French and Italian; but as the few books thrown in
their way were far above their capacities, or devotional, they neither
acquired ideas nor sentiments, and passed their time, when not
compelled to repeat words, in dressing, quarrelling with each other,
or conversing with their maids by stealth, till they were brought into
company as marriageable.
Their mother, a widow, was busy in the mean time in keeping up her
connections, as she termed a numerous acquaintance, lest her girls
should want a proper introduction into the great world. And these
young ladies, with minds vulgar in every sense of the word, and
spoiled tempers, entered life puffed up with notions of their own
consequence, and looking down with contempt on those who could not vie
with them in dress and parade.
With respect to love, nature, or their nurses, had taken care to
teach them the physical meaning of the word; and, as they had few
topics of conversation, and fewer refinements of sentiment, they
expressed their gross wishes not in very delicate phrases, when they
spoke freely, talking of matrimony.
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