Page:The Daughters of England.djvu/248

Rh get of awaking to the conviction that her love exists no longer.

Though truth should be engraven upon every thought, and word, and act, which occurs in your intercourse with the man of your choice, there is implanted in the nature of woman, a shrinking delicacy, which ought ever to prompt her to keep back some of her affection for the time when she becomes a wife. No woman ever gained, but many, very many have been losers, by displaying all at first. Let sufficient of your love be told, to prevent suspicion, or distrust; and the self-complacency of man will be sure to supply the rest. Suffer it not, then, to be unfolded to its full extent. In the trials of married life, you will have ample need for an additional supply. You will want it for sickness, for sorrow, for all the different exigencies of real experience; but, above all, you will want it to re-awaken the tenderness of your husband, when worldly cares and pecuniary disappointments have too much absorbed his better feelings; and what surprise so agreeable to him, as to discover, in his farther progress through the wilderness of life, so sweet, so deep a fountain, as woman's perfect love?

This prudent and desirable restraint of female delicacy during the period of courtship, will prevent those dangerous demands being made upon mere affection to supply interest, for an occasion, which after all, and particularly to men of business, is apt to be rather a tedious one. Let your amusements, then, even during that period, be of an intellectual nature, that your lover may never even for a single moment have occasion to feel that your society grows vapid, or palls upon his taste. It is better a thousand times, that reading or conversation, or the company of others, should be forced upon him, so that he should regret having had so little of yours, than that the idea should once glance across his mind, that he had had too much, or that the time spent