eit of myself, but the opinion of all that knew the family.

I had with all these the common vanity of my sex, viz. that being
really taken for very handsome, or, if you please, for a great beauty,
I very well knew it, and had as good an opinion of myself as anybody
else could have of me; and particularly I loved to hear anybody speak
of it, which could not but happen to me sometimes, and was a great
satisfaction to me.

Thus far I have had a smooth story to tell of myself, and in all this
part of my life I not only had the reputation of living in a very good
family, and a family noted and respected everywhere for virtue and
sobriety, and for every valuable thing; but I had the character too of
a very sober, modest, and virtuous young woman, and such I had always
been; neither had I yet any occasion to think of anything else, or to
know what a temptation to wickedness meant.

But that which I was too vain of was my ruin, or rather my vanity was
the cause of it. The lady in the house where I was had two sons, young
gentlemen of very promising parts and of extraordinary behaviour, and
it was my misfortune to be very well with them both, but they managed
themselves with me in a quite different manner.

The eldest, a gay gentleman that knew the town as well as the country,
and though he had levity enough to do an ill-natured thing, yet had too
much judgment of things to pay too dear for his pleasures; he began
with the unhappy snare to all women, viz. taking notice upon all
occasions how pretty I was, as he called it, how agreeable, how
well-carriaged, and the like; and this he contrived so subtly, as if he
had known as well how to catch a woman in his net as a partridge when
he went a-setting; for he would contrive to be talking this to his
sisters when, though I was not by, yet when he knew I was not far off
but that I should be sure to hear him. His sisters would return softly
to him, 'Hush, brother, she will hear you; she is but in the next
room.' Then he would put it off and talk softlier, as if he had not
know it, and begin to acknowledge he was wrong; and then, as if he had
forgot himself, he would speak aloud again, and I, that was so well
pleased to hear it, was sure to listen for it upon all occasions.

After he had thus baited his hook, and found easily enough the method
how to lay it in my way, he played an opener game; and one day, going
by his sister's chamber when I was there, doing something about
dr