could not but
apprehend that her defective moral education, her inflammable and
reckless disposition, might make me one day repent of my cordiality and
intimacy.

In conversation with this young woman I enjoyed no exchange of wit or
sentiment, no perspicacity of intellect, no piquant sallies and
discussions. On the other hand, her way of meeting me was always frank
and open; she showed much decency and neatness in her poverty; told
anecdotes with comic grace; mimicked her comrades, the actresses, with
spirit; evinced a real repugnance for immodesty; betrayed the
ingenuousness of her nature by a hundred little traits. What above all
attracted me towards her was that she could not tell a lie without
showing by involuntary blushes how much the effort cost her. Time taught
me that I ought to mistrust her apparent ingenuousness. The artless
sallies with which she turned old friends and benefactors into ridicule
made me reflect that she might come to treat me in like manner. Her
blushes, when she told a fib, did not spring from a dislike of lying,
but from anger with herself for not being able to distort the truth more
cleverly. Yet self-love is a weakness so ingrained in human frailty,
that men are always ready to believe that they will fare better than
their neighbours, because they think they have deserved better, or fancy
themselves preferred by the woman on whose very faults they put an
indulgent interpretation. This was my case with the Ricci.

I was never able to induce her to sacrifice even a few hours a day to
reading good books or exercising her mind by writing. Arguments,
entreaties, reproaches were all thrown away. She excused herself by
pleading her domestic duties; and though I was ever anxious to spend our
time together in useful studies, as I had done with other actresses, I
could not bring her to do more than con the parts she had to play upon
the stage. Probably she thought that her native pluck and talent were
sufficient to sustain her without troubling her brains by serious work.
The duties which she always pleaded consisted in sitting at her
toilet-table before the eternal looking-glass, arranging laces, changing
ribands, altering the folds of veils, matching colours, and such-like
frivolities. All these things are useful with a view to stage effect;
but exclusive devotion to them distracts the mind from the higher
exigencies of dramatic art, leads an actress to court applause by
illegitimate means, and