nsions on this head from your last letter to me: but
he seemed capable of taking what I know to be real greatness of soul, in
an unworthy sense: for he mentioned directly upon it the expectations
your friends had, that you should (previous to any reconciliation with
them) appear in a court of justice against the villain--IF you could do
it with the advantage to yourself that I hinted might be done.

And truly, if I would have heard him, he had indelicacy enough to have
gone into the nature of the proof of the crime upon which they wanted to
have Lovelace arraigned. Yet this is a man improved by travel and
learning!--Upon my word, my dear, I, who have been accustomed to the most
delicate conversation ever since I had the honour to know you, despise
this sex from the gentleman down to the peasant.

Upon the whole, I find that Mr. Morden has a very slender notion of
women's virtue in particular cases: for which reason I put him down,
though your favourite, as one who is not entitled to cast the first
stone.

I never knew a man who deserved to be well thought of himself for his
morals, who had a slight opinion of the virtue of our sex in general.
For if, from the difference of temperament and education, modesty,
chastity, and piety too, are not to be found in our sex preferably to
the other, I should think it a sign of much worse nature in ours.

He even hinted (as from your relations indeed) that it is impossible
but there most be some will where there is much love.

These sort of reflections are enough to make a woman, who has at heart
her own honour and the honour of her sex, to look about her, and consider
what she is doing when she enters into an intimacy with these wretches;
since it is plain, that whenever she throws herself into the power of a
man, and leaves for him her parents or guardians, every body will believe
it to be owing more to her good luck than to her discretion if there be
not an end of her virtue: and let the man be ever such a villain to her,
she must take into her own bosom a share of his guilty baseness.

I am writing to general cases. You, my dear, are out of the question.
Your story, as I have heretofore said, will afford a warning as well as
an example:* For who is it that will not infer, that if a person of your
fortune, character, and merit, could not escape ruin, after she had put
herself into the power of her hyaena, what can a thoughtless, fond, giddy
creature expect?

* See Vol.