So, to fortify the damsel, he gave her a lecture: first, on young men--their selfish inconsiderateness, their weakness, the wanton lives they led, their trick of lying for any sugar-plum, and how they laughed at their dupes.

Secondly, as to the conduct consequently to be prescribed to girls, who were weaker, frailer, by disposition more confiding, and who must believe nothing but what they heard their elders say.
Emilia gave patient heed to the lecture.
"But I am safe," she remarked, when he had finished; "for my lover is not as those young men are." To speak at all, and arrange his ideas, was a vexation to the poor merchant.

He was here like an irritable traveller, who knocks at a gate, which makes as if it opens, without letting him in.

Emilia's naive confidence he read as stupidity.

It brought on a fresh access of the nervous fever lurking in him, and he cried, jumping from his seat: "Well, you can't have him, and there's an end.