All understood the art of speaking fair when a point was to be gained, and could with consummate skill and at a moment's notice turn the cold shoulder the instant civility ceased to be profitable.

Very little open quarrelling ever took place amongst them; but backbiting and talebearing were universal.

Close friendships were forbidden by the rules of the school, and no one girl seemed to cultivate more regard for another than was just necessary to secure a companion when solitude would have been irksome.

They were each and all supposed to have been reared in utter unconsciousness of vice.
The precautions used to keep them ignorant, if not innocent, were innumerable.

How was it, then, that scarcely one of those girls having attained the age of fourteen could look a man in the face with modesty and propriety?
An air of bold, impudent flirtation, or a loose, silly leer, was sure to answer the most ordinary glance from a masculine eye.
I know nothing of the arcana of the Roman Catholic religion, and I am not a bigot in matters of theology, but I suspect the root of this precocious impurity, so obvious, so general in Popish countries, is to be found in the discipline, if not the doctrines of the Church of Rome.
I record what I have seen: these girls belonged to what are called the respectable ranks of society; they had all been carefully brought up, yet was the mass of them mentally depraved.