One morning I took a ride alone to breakfast at Lady Aston's; Mr. Stanley having expressed a particular desire that I should cultivate the acquaintance of her son. "Sir George is not quite twenty," said he, "and your being a few years older, will make him consider your friendship as an honor to him; I am sure it will be an advantage." In her own little family circle, I had the pleasure of seeing Lady Aston appear to more advantage than I had yet done. Her understanding is good, and her affections are strong. She had received a too favorable impression of my character from Mr. Stanley, and treated me with as much openness as if I had been his son. The gentle girls, animated by the spirit of their brother, seemed to derive both happiness and importance from his presence: while the amiable young baronet himself won my affection by his engaging manners, and my esteem by his good sense and his considerable acquirements in every thing which becomes a gentleman. This visit exemplified a remark I had sometimes made, that shy characters, who from natural timidity are reserved in general society, open themselves with peculiar warmth and frankness to a few select friends, or to an individual of whom they think kindly. A distant manner is not always, as is suspected, the result of a cold heart, or a dull head; nor is gayety necessarily connected with feeling. High animal spirits, though they often evaporate in mere talk, yet by their warmth and quickness of motion obtain the credit of strong sensibility: a sensibility, however, of which the heart is not always the fountain. While in the timid, that silence which is construed into pride, indifference, or want of capacity, is often the effect of keen feelings. Friendship is the genial climate in which such hearts disclose themselves; they flourish in the shade, and kindness alone makes them expand. A keen discerner will often detect, in such characters, qualities which are not always connected with the rattling tongue Of saucy and audacious eloquence. When people who have seen little of each other are thrown together, nothing brings on free communication so quickly or so pleasantly, as their being both intimate with a third person, for whom all parties entertain one common sentiment. Mr. Stanley seemed always a point of union between his neighbors and me. After various topics had been discussed, Lady Aston remarked, that she could now trace the goodness of Providence in having so ordered events, as to make those things which she had so much dreaded at the time, work out advantages which could not have been otherwise obtained for her.