"My dear," she said, "before one's father one cannot say all that one would wish"--could such wisdom be possible at seventeen-and-a-half? "This is a very shocking and wicked place; we used to be taught that girls ought to sit in a corner, after they had put on their best things, and wait to be spoken to, and not to think about attracting the men; and not, indeed, to think about the men at all, save in their own room, where they might perhaps pray that if there were any men in the world not addicted to gambling, drinking, cursing, hunting, fighting, and striking, those men might be led by Heaven to cast eyes of love upon them. Oh!"--here she held up her hands and shook her head just like a woman four times her age, and steeped in experience--"in this place it is not long that the girls sit in a corner, and, indeed, I do not greatly love corners myself; but the very wives, the matrons, the married women, my dear,"--her voice rose with each word till it had mounted nearly to the top of the possible scale,--"are coquettes, who interfere with the girls, and would have the gallants dangling at their heels. As for their husbands, they are the last persons considered worthy of their notice; they put on their dresses and deck themselves out to please anybody rather than the persons whom it should be their only study to please." "Nancy," I whispered, "when you are married, will you never, never dress to please anybody but your husband?" "Why," she replied, "my father, my mother, my children (if I have any), my friends will be pleased to see me go fine. But not for lovers--oh!" We agreed that would-be lovers should be received and properly dealt with before marriage. "Bashfulness, here," continued the pretty moralist, "is--Heaven help us!--lack of breeding; what goes down is defiance of manners and modesty. Propriety is laughed at; noise is wit; laughter is repartee; most of the women gamble; nearly all are in debt; nobody reads anything serious; and we backbite each other perpetually." I know not what had put her in so strange a mood for moralising.