.

Her experience had been so much larger than mine, and so wholly
different, and she possessed such unbounded facility of recounting all
she had seen and felt, and absolute sincerity and unreserve in this
respect were so fully established between us, that I can imagine nothing
equally instructive and delightful with her conversation.

Books are cold, jejune, vexatious in their sparingness of information at
one time and their impertinent loquacity at another. Besides, all they
choose to give they give at once; they allow no questions, offer no
further explanations, and bend not to the caprices of our curiosity.
They talk to us behind a screen. Their tone is lifeless and monotonous.
They charm not our attention by mute significances of gesture and looks.
They spread no light upon their meaning by cadences and emphasis and
pause.

How different was Mrs. Fielding's discourse! So versatile; so bending to
the changes of the occasion; so obsequious to my curiosity, and so
abundant in that very knowledge in which I was most deficient, and on
which I set the most value, the knowledge of the human heart; of
society as it existed in another world, more abundant in the varieties
of customs and characters, than I had ever had the power to witness.

Partly selfish I have said my motives were, but not so, as long as I saw
that my friend derived pleasure, in her turn, from my company. Not that
I could add directly to her knowledge or pleasure, but that expansion of
heart, that ease of utterance and flow of ideas which always were
occasioned by my approach, were sources of true pleasure of which she
had been long deprived, and for which her privation had given her a
higher relish than ever.

She lived in great affluence and independence, but made use of her
privileges of fortune chiefly to secure to herself the command of her
own time. She had been long ago tired and disgusted with the dull and
fulsome uniformity and parade of the play-house and ballroom. Formal
visits were endured as mortifications and penances, by which the
delights of privacy and friendly intercourse were by contrast increased.
Music she loved, but never sought it in places of public resort, or from
the skill of mercenary performers; and books were not the least of her
pleasures.

As to me, I was wax in her hand. Without design and without effort, I
was always of that form she wished me to assume. My own happiness became
a secondary passion, and her gratifica