was; for supposing it had to be written, the language of the natural
impulse called up to write it was necessarily in request, and that
language is easily overdone, so as to be discordant with the situation,
while it is, as the writer feels, a fairly true and well-formed
expression of the pretty impulse. But wiser is it always that the star
in the ascendant should not address the one waning. Hardly can a word be
uttered without grossly wounding. She would not do it to a younger
rival: the letter strikes on the recipient's age! She babbles of a
friendship: she plays at childish ninny! The display of her ingenuous
happiness causes feminine nature's bosom to rise in surges. The
declarations of her devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a
deeper, a longer-tried suffering. Actually the letter of the rising star
assumes personal feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and
personal feeling is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt
also of one who can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.

Among Alvan's gifts the understanding of women did not rank high.
He was too robust, he had been too successful. Your very successful hero
regards them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at a
peculiar poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one knocking down the
other--figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with their
sisters. His tastes had led him into the avenues of success, and as he
had not encountered grand resistances, he entertained his opinion of
their sex. The particular maxim he cherished was, to stake everything on
his making a favourable first impression: after which single figure, he
said, all your empty naughts count with women for hundreds, thousands,
millions: noblest virtues are but sickly units. He would have stared
like any Philistine at the tale of their capacity to advance to a
likeness unto men in their fight with the world. Women for him were
objects to be chased, the politician's relaxation, taken like the