y them.

He afterwards talked very seriously, at times, to Mr. Hickman: at times,
I say; for it was with such breaks and starts of gaiety, turning to this
lady, and to that, and then to Mr. Hickman again, resuming a serious or
a gay air at pleasure, that he took every body's eye, the women's
especially; who were full of their whispering admirations of him,
qualified with if's and but's, and what pity's, and such sort of stuff,
that showed in their very dispraises too much liking.

Well may our sex be the sport and ridicule of such libertines!
Unthinking eye-governed creatures!--Would not a little reflection teach
us, that a man of merit must be a man of modesty, because a diffident
one? and that such a wretch as this must have taken his degrees in
wickedness, and gone through a course of vileness, before he could arrive
at this impenetrable effrontery? an effrontery which can produce only
from the light opinion he has of us, and the high one of himself.

But our sex are generally modest and bashful themselves, and are too apt
to consider that which in the main is their principal grace, as a defect:
and finely do they judge, when they think of supplying that defect by
choosing a man that cannot be ashamed.

His discourse to Mr. Hickman turned upon you, and his acknowledged
injuries of you: though he could so lightly start from the subject, and
return to it.

I have no patience with such a devil--man he cannot be called. To be
sure he would behave in the same manner any where, or in any presence,
even at the altar itself, if a woman were with him there.

It shall ever be a rule with me, that he who does not regard a woman with
some degree of reverence, will look upon her and occasionally treat her
with contempt.

He had the confidence to offer to take me out; but I absolutely refused
him, and shunned him all I could, putting on the most contemptuous airs;
but nothing could mortify him.

I wished twenty times I had not been there.

The gentlemen were as ready as I to wish he had broken his neck, rather
than been present, I believe: for nobody was regarded but he. So little
of the fop; yet so elegant and rich in his dress: his person so specious:
his air so intrepid: so much meaning and penetration in his face: so much
gaiety, yet so little affectation; no mere toupet-man; but all manly; and
his courage and wit, the one so known, the other so dreaded, you must
think the petits-maitres (of which there were four o