Nature has multiplied attractions around her.
Youth is in itself attractive. The freshness of budding beauty needs
no foreign aid to set it off; it pleases merely because it is fresh,
and budding, and beautiful. But it is for the married state that a
woman needs the most instruction, and in which she should be most on
her guard to maintain her powers of pleasing. No woman can expect to
be to her husband all that he fancied her when he was a lover. Men are
always doomed to be duped, not so much by the arts of the sex, as by
their own imaginations. They are always wooing goddesses, and marrying
mere mortals. A woman should, therefore, ascertain what was the charm
that rendered her so fascinating when a girl, and endeavour to keep it
up when she has become a wife. One great thing undoubtedly was, the
chariness of herself and her conduct, which an unmarried female always
observes. She should maintain the same niceness and reserve in her
person and habits, and endeavour still to preserve a freshness and
virgin delicacy in the eye of her husband. She should remember that
the province of woman is to be wooed, not to woo; to be caressed, not
to caress. Man is an ungrateful being in love; bounty loses instead of
winning him.
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