all probability, do not think you
selfish. Are you certain, however, that the estimate formed of you by
your nearest relatives will not be the estimate formed of you by even
acquaintance some years hence, when lessened good-humour and
strengthened habits of selfishness have brought out into more striking
relief the natural faults of your character?

The selfishness of the gay, amusing, good-humoured girl is often
unobserved, almost always tolerated; but when youth, beauty, and
vivacity are gone, the vice appears in its native deformity, and she who
indulges it becomes as unlovely as unloved. It is for the future you
have cause to fear,--a future for which you are preparing gloom and
dislike by the habits you are now forming in the small details of daily
life, as well as in the pleasurable excitements of social intercourse.
As I said before, these, at present almost imperceptible, habits are
unheeded by those who are only your acquaintance: but they are not the
less sowing the seeds of future unhappiness for you. You will,
assuredly, at some period or other, reap in dislike what you are now
sowing in selfishness. If, however, the warning voice of an "unknown
friend" is attended to, there is yet time to complete a comparatively
easy victory over this, your besetting sin; while, on the contrary,
every week and every month's delay, by riveting more strongly the chains
of habit, increases at once your difficulties and your consequent
discouragement.

This day, this very hour, the conflict ought to begin: but, alas! how
may this be, when you are not yet even aware of the existence of that
danger which I warn you. It is most truly "a part of sin to be
unconscious of itself."[40] It will also be doubly difficult to effect
the necessary preliminary of convincing you of selfishness, when I am so
situated as not to be able to point out to you with certainty any
particular act indicative of the vice in question. This obliges me to
enter into more varied details, to touch a thousand different strings,
in the hope that, among so many, I may by chance touch upon the right
one.

Now, it is a certain fact, that in such inquiries as the present, our
enemies may be of much more use to us than our friends. They may, they
generally do, exaggerate our faults, but the exaggeration gives them a
relief and depth of colouring which may enable the accusation to force
its way through the dimness and heavy-sightedness of our self-deception.
Ex