To succeed in your good resolution great firmness is required; you will be obliged to condemn the frivolity of young persons in whose company circumstances may throw you. You must set your face against the fashions of the world, against the force of habit and prejudice, perhaps against the freaks of your own character. But remember that the reward awaiting you is well worth the struggle you are asked to sustain; and this struggle will not be so difficult as you may think, if you face it courageously, coherently and perseveringly, employing, of course, the proper means. To begin, you should cast overboard that inclination to frivolity wherever you meet with it. But since a bad plant is more quickly and radically destroyed by pulling it out of the roots than by simply lopping of the tops as they appear over ground, so do we likewise succeed better in correcting a bad habit, or destroying an evil inclination by attacking it at its source than by being satisfied with arresting its bad effects, allowing the cause to remain. And since it is in the mind that frivolity takes up its abode, it is there that it must be sought for and destroyed. There exists among the different faculties of the soul a certain order, a species of hierarchy which gives a certain preponderance to some of them over the others; consequently some of them are of an inferior while others are of a superior order. You will labor in vain to give a serious cast to your sentiments and actions if you feed your mind on frivolous thoughts, while serious thoughts are the progenitors of enduring affections and noble deeds. Hence the culture of the mind is an important factor to the acquisition of a taste for those things which are the true ornament of woman. Sentiments are the outcomings of thoughts, and both together are expressed by actions. Feed your intelligence with serious thoughts; never amuse it with those trifles which absorb the attention of persons of your age. Do not think that those serious thoughts badly become your youth; that they would deprive you of a part of your comfort, rendering you wearisome to others and insupportable to yourself; that they would give you a pedantic and affected air which would lead others to believe that you despised them; that every age has its peculiar tastes and customs, and that it would be an act of uncalled-for severity to exact from a young person just beginning, so to say, the apprenticeship of life, a gravity of manners and dispositions that would scarcely be required at a maturer age. Seriousness is required in all ages, but not always in the same degree. Thus the gravity befitting a young lady is very different from that expected from a woman more advanced in years. This virtue, far from excluding legitimate amusement and pleasure, only regulates and elevates them by confining them to just limits. An agreeable and lively turn may be given to the most serious things, rendering them pleasing and acceptable to the minds of all.