Could she, without blushing, listen to the
passionate conversations of those who had lead each other to
destruction, after having exhausted all the resources of heart and
mind to render vice amiable, even when their fall would seem to be
less the effect of a criminal will than the result of a kind of
fatality? Your answer to all this would be emphatically, no!
But while young ladies will neither listen to nor look at scenes of
this nature, many, alas! do not scruple to look at them in books,
where they are much more dangerous, for being adorned with all the
charms of style, and because the persons represented are made to
speak and act in a much more luring manner than they do in reality.
They devour with avidity those dangerous, and sometimes scurrilous
pages; but while they chain their attention to the matter they are
reading, their imagination gains the ascendancy over all the senses,
and under their united action images are formed which leave a lasting
impression on the mind--images of misfortune that has befallen
persons either through their own fault or the fault of others, and
which, through sympathy, the human heart, whether wrong or right, is
always ready to find a pretext to justify.
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