Perhaps under such training, and with a slight memory of early mortification to point your spirit, you affect those gallantries of heart and action which the world calls flirtation.  You may study brilliancies of speech to wrap their net around those susceptible hearts whose habit is too naive by nature to wear the leaden covering of custom.  You win approaches by artful counterfeit of earnestness, and dash away any naivete of confidence with some brave sophism of the world.  A doubt or a distrust piques your pride, and makes attentions wear a humility that wins anew.  An indifference piques you more, and throws into your art a counter-indifference,—­lit up by bold flashes of feeling,—­sparkling with careless brilliancies, and crowned with a triumph of neglect.

It is curious how ingeniously a man’s vanity will frame apologies for such action.—­It is pleasant to give pleasure; you like to see a joyous sparkle of the eye, whether lit up by your presence or by some buoyant fancy.  It is a beguiling task to weave words into some soft, melodious flow, that shall keep the ear and kindle the eye; and to strew it over with half-hidden praises, so deftly couched in double terms that their aroma shall only come to the heart hours afterward, and seem to be the merest accidents of truth.  It is a happy art to make such subdued show of emotion as seems to struggle with pride, and to flush the eye with a moisture, of which you seem ashamed, and yet are proud.  It is a pretty practice to throw an earnestness into look and gesture, that shall seem full of pleading, and yet—­ask nothing!

And yet it is hard to admire greatly the reputation of that man who builds his triumphs upon womanly weakness; that distinction is not over-enduring whose chiefest merit springs out of the delusions of a too trustful heart.  The man, who wins it, wins only a poor sort of womanly distinction.  Without power to cope with men, he triumphs over the weakness of the other sex only by hypocrisy.  He wears none of the armor of Romans, and he parleys with Punic faith.

——­Yet even now there is a lurking goodness in you that traces its beginning to the old garret-home,—­there is an air in the harvest heats that whispers of the bloom of spring.

And over your brilliant career as man of the world, however lit up by a morbid vanity, or galvanized by a lascivious passion, there will come at times the consciousness of a better heart, struggling beneath your cankered action,—­like the low Vesuvian fire, reeking vainly under rough beds of tufa and scoriated lava.  And as you smile in loge or salon, with daring smiles, or press with villain fondness the hand of those lady-votaries of the same god you serve, there will gleam upon you over the waste of rolling years a memory that quickens again the nobler and bolder instincts of the heart.

Childish recollections, with their purity and earnestness,—­a sister’s love,—­a mother’s solicitude, will flood your soul once more with a gushing sensibility that yearns for enjoyment.  And the consciousness of some lingering nobility of affection, that can only grow great in mating itself with nobility of heart, will sweep off your puny triumphs, your Platonic friendships, your dashing coquetries, like the foul smoke of a city before a fresh breeze of the country autumn.