But my dear, my tender friend, why do you cruelly persist in your disquietude? Wherefore should your repentance exceed your very crime, and your contempt fall on the object which least of all deserves it, yourself? Shall the weakness of one unguarded moment be attended with so black a train of baleful consequences? And are not the very dangers you have been struggling with, a self-evident demonstration of the greatness of your virtue? You lose yourself so entirely in the thought of your defeat, that you have no leisure to consider the triumphs by which it was preceded. If your trials have been sharper, your conquests more numerous, and your resistance more frequent, than those who have escaped, have not you then, I would ask, done more for virtue than they? If you can find no circumstances to justify, dwell on those at least, which extenuate and excuse you. I myself am a tolerable proficient in the art of love, and though my own temper secures me against its violent emotions, if ere I could have felt such a passion as yours was, my struggles would have been much fainter, my surrender more easy, and more dishonourable. Freed as I have been from the temptation, it reflects no honour on my virtue. You are the chaster of the two, though perhaps the more unfortunate. You may perchance be offended that I am so unreserved; but unhappily your situation makes it necessary. I wish from my soul, what I have said were not applicable to you; for I detest pernicious maxims, more than bad actions. [11] If the deed were not already done, and I could have been so base to write, and you to read and hear these axioms, we both of us must be numbered in the wretched class of the abandoned. But as matters stand at present, my duty as your friend requires this at my hands, and you must give me the hearing, or you are lost, lost for ever. For you still possess a thousand rare endowments which a proper esteem of yourself can alone cultivate and preserve. Your real worth will ever exceed your own opinion of it.