If this be really assumed, the author has exhibited
a delicate refinement in the art of writing not surpassed in any work
of imagination known to us. Another ground for the seeming actuality of
the story, to those who have any knowledge of the class to which its
heroine belongs, is the cause to which she attributes her fall. This
was not seduction; for she confesses, what hardly one in a thousand of
her sisters in shame will fail to confess, if they speak the truth,
that she was not seduced;--and neither was it poverty; for her father
was well-to-do, and she the petted attendant, almost the friend, of a
young lady of wealth and station;--but it was her vanity and her
unrestrained passion. She is represented, in the first place, as
regarding a good match, a rich husband, as the great object of life;
and to such a woman chastity is not a sentiment, but a dictate of
prudence; just as to a man whose great purpose is the getting of money,
honesty is but the best policy. After she has met the man who brings
her fate with him, (it might as well have been any other of his class,)
she writes,--"The one great pleasing and wretched hope of my mind was
that I should see him again; for it is so pleasant to believe that any
man in a higher station should take an interest in me.
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