She would not do it to a younger rival: the letter strikes on the recipient's age! She babbles of a friendship: she plays at childish ninny! The display of her ingenuous happiness causes feminine nature's bosom to rise in surges.

The declarations of her devotedness to the man waken comparisons with a deeper, a longer-tried suffering.

Actually the letter of the rising star assumes personal feeling to have died out of the abandoned luminary, and personal feeling is chafed to its acutest edge by the perusal; contempt also of one who can stupidly simulate such innocence, is roused.
Among Alvan's gifts the understanding of women did not rank high.

He was too robust, he had been too successful.

Your very successful hero regards them as nine-pins destined to fall, the whole tuneful nine, at a peculiar poetical twist of the bowler's wrist, one knocking down the other--figuratively, for their scruples, or for their example with their sisters.