Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/218

Rh all with whom it comes in contact; while friendship requires that you should always be the same, and nothing can be more painful to the feelings of a friend, than to find that caprice, or the indulgence of your own humour, is a matter of more importance to you than her happiness. Such wounds, however, are happily not incurable. Friendship, thus repulsed, is soon withdrawn; and the capricious woman has the satisfaction of finding herself left at last to the enjoyment of her different moods alone. There is, in short, something in the very nature of caprice so selfish and ungenerous, so opposed to all the requirements of affection, that in no connection in life, except where the tie is indissoluble, can it long be endured.

But while we are justified in acting upon the repulsion which caprice so naturally excites, there are other trials which, if true, friendship must submit to endure; because they necessarily spring out of the nature of the human heart, and, instead of being checked by the influence of society, they are fostered by it, and subsist upon the very elements of which it is composed. One of these evils is a spurious kind of social intercourse, falsely denominated friendship, which, unfortunately, sometimes links itself with the true. I say falsely, for that friendship is not worthy of the name, which is founded upon tale-bearing and detraction. Yet, how much of the intimacy of young women consists in the magnifying and telling of little troubles, particularly of a domestic nature, and most commonly injurious to some member of the household to which they belong.

Let the young be especially warned against this most insidious and most dangerous temptation; and let them be assured, that there are few causes of more bitter repentance in after life, than the reflection that they have thus wantonly made themselves enemies to those of their own house. There is one fact which ought of itself to deter them from