In such a diversity of dispositions, his conquests were attended
with all the heart-burnings, animosities, and turmoils of jealousy
and spite. The younger class took all opportunities of mortifying
their seniors in public, by treating them with that indignity which,
contrary to the general privilege of age, is, by the consent and
connivance of mankind, leveled against those who have the misfortune
to come under the denomination of old maids; and these last retorted
their hostilities in the private machinations of slander, supported
by experience and subtilty of invention. Not one day passed in
which some new story did not circulate, to the prejudice of one or
other of those rivals.
If our hero, in the long-room, chanced to quit one of the moralists,
with whom he had been engaged in conversation, he was immediately
accosted by a number of the opposite faction, who, with ironical
smiles, upbraided him with cruelty to the poor lady he had left,
exhorted him to have compassion on her sufferings; and, turning
their eyes towards the object of their intercession, broke forth
into a universal peal of laughter.
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