I don’t know how it is, Belford; but women think themselves entitled to take any freedoms with us; while we are unpolite, forsooth, and I can’t tell what, if we don’t tell a pack of cursed lies, and make black white, in their favour—­teaching us to be hypocrites, yet stigmatizing us, at other times, for deceivers.

I defended ye all as well as I could:  but you know there was no attempting aught but a palliative defence, to one of her principles.

I will summarily give thee a few of my pleas.

’To the pure, every little deviation seemed offensive:  yet I saw not, that there was any thing amiss the whole evening, either in the words or behaviour of any of my friends.  Some people could talk but upon one or two subjects:  she upon every one:  no wonder, therefore, they talked to what they understood best; and to mere objects of sense.  Had she honoured us with more of her conversation, she would have been less disgusted with ours; for she saw how every one was prepared to admire her, whenever she opened her lips.  You, in particular, had said, when she retired, that virtue itself spoke when she spoke, but that you had such an awe upon you, after she had favoured us with an observation or two on a subject started, that you should ever be afraid in her company to be found most exceptionable, when you intended to be least so.’

Plainly, she said, she neither liked my companions nor the house she was in.

I liked not the house any more than she:  though the people were very obliging, and she had owned they were less exceptionable to herself than at first:  And were we not about another of our own?

She did not like Miss Partington—­let her fortune be what it would, and she had heard a great deal said of her fortune, she should not choose an intimacy with her.  She thought it was a hardship to be put upon such a difficulty as she was put upon the preceding night, when there were lodgers in the front-house, whom they had reason to be freer with, than, upon so short an acquaintance, with her.

I pretended to be an utter stranger as to this particular; and, when she explained herself upon it, condemned Mrs. Sinclair’s request, and called it a confident one.

She, artfully, made lighter of her denial of the girl for a bedfellow, than she thought of it, I could see that; for it was plain, she supposed there was room for me to think she had been either over-nice, or over-cautious.

I offered to resent Mrs. Sinclair’s freedom.

No; there was no great matter in it.  It was best to let it pass.  It might be thought more particular in her to deny such a request, than in Mrs. Sinclair to make it, or in Miss Partington to expect it to be complied with.  But as the people below had a large acquaintance, she did not know how often she might indeed have her retirements invaded, if she gave way.  And indeed there were levities in the behaviour of that young lady, which she could not so far pass over as to wish an intimacy with her.