instance,
so absolutely disinterested, that it tends to deprive myself of the only
comfort left me.

Your acknowledged sullens; your tearing from your mother's hands the
letter she thought she had a right to see, and burning it, as you own,
before her face; your refusal to see the man, who is so willing to obey
you for the sake of your unhappy friend, and this purely to vex your
mother; can you think, my dear, upon this brief recapitulation of hardly
one half of the faulty particulars you give, that these faults are
excusable in one who so well knows her duty?

Your mother had a good opinion of me once: is not that a reason why she
should be more regarded now, when I have, as she believes, so deservedly
forfeited it? A prejudice in favour is as hard to be totally overcome as
a prejudice in disfavour. In what a strong light, then, must that error
appear to her, that should so totally turn her heart against me, herself
not a principal in the case?

There are other duties, you say, besides the filial duty: but that, my
dear, must be a duty prior to all other duties; a duty anterior, as I
may say, to you very birth: and what duty ought not to give way to that,
when they come in competition?

You are persuaded, that the duty to your friend, and the filial duty,
may be performed without derogating from either. Your mother thinks
otherwise. What is the conclusion to be drawn from these premises?

When your mother sees, how much I suffer in my reputation from the step
I have taken, from whom she and all the world expected better things,
how much reason has she to be watchful over you! One evil draws on
another after it; and how knows she, or any body, where it may stop?

Does not the person who will vindicate, or seek to extenuate, a faulty
step in another [in this light must your mother look upon the matter in
question between her and you] give an indication either of a culpable
will, or a weak judgment; and may not she apprehend, that the censorious
will think, that such a one might probably have equally failed under the
same inducements and provocations, to use your own words, as applied to
me in a former letter?

Can there be a stronger instance in human lie than mine has so early
furnished, within a few months past, (not to mention the uncommon
provocations to it, which I have met with,) of the necessity of the
continuance of a watchful parent's care over a daughter: let that
daughter have obtained ever so great a