"You have drawn something of the character of a Spanish woman. Their love and their hate is equally fierce; and both easily excited, they are devoted in all their passions. I have thought that this grew from the secluded life they live. Ardency is natural to the race, and this restrained makes their lives one long romance. Their world is all of imagination. The contacts of real life they never meet outside of their prison-homes, and the influence of experience is never known. They are seen through bars, are sought through bars, they love through bars--and the struggle is, to escape from these restraints; and the moral of the act or means for its accomplishment, or the object to be attained, never enters the mind. Such natures properly reared to know the world, to see it, hear it, and suffer it, tunes all the attributes of the mind and heart to make sweet music. Nothing mellows the heart like sorrow; nothing so softens the obduracy of our natures as experience. None, sir, man or woman, are fitted for the world without the experiences its contact brings. These experiences are teachings, and the bitter ones the best. To be happy, we must have been miserable; it is the idiosyncracy of the mind, to judge by comparison; and the eternal absence of grief leaves the mind unappreciative of the incidents and excitements which bring to him or her who have suffered, such exquisite enjoyment. The rue of life is scarcely misery to those who have never tasted its ambrosia." "You are young, sir, thus to philosophize, and must have seen and experienced more than your years would indicate." "Some, sir, in an incident see all of its characters that the world in a lifetime may present. They suffer, and they enjoy with an acuteness unknown to most natures; and in youth gain the experiences and knowledge they impart, while most of the world forget the pain and the pleasure of an incident with its evanescence. With such, experience teaches nothing. These progress in the world blindly and are always stumbling and falling." "The ladies have retired--shall we imitate their example, sir? This will light you to your chamber; good night."