She heard and saw every thing with surprise; and though she loved and admired the individuals, she felt herself unfit to live among them. There was a liberality of opinion and a satiric turn which she could not at once comprehend; and she said to herself, daily, as she considered those around her—“They are different from me.—I can never assimilate myself to them: I was every thing in my own family; and I am nothing here.” What talents she had, were of a sort they could not appreciate; and all the defects were those which they most despised. The refinement, the romance, the sentiment she had imbibed, appeared in their eyes assumed and unnatural; her strict opinions perfectly ridiculous; her enthusiasm absolute insanity; and the violence of her temper, if contradicted or opposed, the pettishness of a spoiled and wayward child. Yet too indulgent, too kind to reject her, they loved her, they caressed her, they bore with her petulance and mistakes. It was, however, as a child they considered her:—they treated her as one not arrived at maturity of judgment. Her reason by degrees became convinced by the arguments which she continually heard; and all that was spoken at random, she treasured up as truth: even whilst vehemently contending and disputing in defence of her favourite tenets, she became of another opinion. So dangerous is a little knowledge—so unstable is violence. Her soul’s immortal hopes seemed to be shaken by the unguarded jests of the profane, who casually visited at Monteith, or whom she met with elsewhere:—she read till she confounded truth and falsehood, nor knew any longer what to believe:—she heard folly censured till she took it to be criminal; but crime she saw tolerated if well concealed. The names she had set in her very heart as pure and spotless, she heard traduced and vilified:—indignantly she defended them with all the warmth of ardent youth:—they were proved guilty; she wept in agony, she loved them not less, but she thought less favourably of those who had undeceived her. The change in Calantha’s mind was constant—was daily: it never ceased—it never paused; and none marked its progress, or checked her career. In emancipating herself from much that was no doubt useless, she stripped herself by degrees of all, till she neither feared, nor cared, nor knew any longer what was, from what was not.