If you remain a child to your mother you will preserve
your youth through the toilsome days of life to a ripe old age, an
advantage so precious that nothing should be left undone to secure it.
Woman is pleasing to others only in as much as she possesses this
adornment, which exhales a sweet odor like the perfume of youth.
Alas! how many women there are who have never been children even with
their mothers. Women from their youth, they have treated their mother
with a kind of diffidence, dissembling at an age when the only danger
to be feared should be an excessive confidence.
As for the gratitude and love that you owe your parents, I would
regard it as an injury offered to the candor of your age and the
sincerity of your heart to undertake to prove that these are
obligations which you are in duty bound to discharge. God who has
commanded us to honor our parents, left us no precept obliging us to
love them; but while He engraved other commandments upon stone this
one He has written in the very essence of our being. Hence I appeal
only to your heart in this matter, leaving you entirely to its
instincts to point out to you your duty, which to assert by any other
proof, I fear would lead you to suspect that there are children
unnatural enough to forget and neglect their parents.
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