Some one says, keep your secret yourself, for how can you expect others to do that which you cannot ? Still, I am persuaded more secrets are revealed by being kept than by being told.

You enlist a person's honour, and, still dearer, their vanity, on your side by confidence. We all desire to deserve the good opinion which we believe we have inspired ; but distrust awakens all that is little and mean within us. Why should we be better than we are held to be ? We are mortified by not being thought worthy of trust ; and there is also a feeling of small triumph in circumventing those who doubt either our inclination or our power of service. We like to show that we are not the nonentities for which we were taken.