I wonder if she was ever in love.
I commenced my career--or my first campaign, as my uncle calls it--kindling with bright hopes and fancies--chiefly raised by this conversation--and full of confidence in my own discretion.

At first, I was delighted with the novelty and excitement of our London life; but soon I began to weary of its mingled turbulence and constraint, and sigh for the freshness and freedom of home.

My new acquaintances, both male and female, disappointed my expectations, and vexed and depressed me by turns; for I soon grew tired of studying their peculiarities, and laughing at their foibles--particularly as I was obliged to keep my criticisms to myself, for my aunt would not hear them--and they--the ladies especially--appeared so provokingly mindless, and heartless, and artificial.

The gentlemen seemed better, but, perhaps, it was because I knew them less--perhaps, because they flattered me; but I did not fall in love with any of them; and, if their attentions pleased me one moment, they provoked me the next, because they put me out of humour with myself, by revealing my vanity and making me fear I was becoming like some of the ladies I so heartily despised.
There was one elderly gentleman that annoyed me very much; a rich old friend of my uncle's, who, I believe, thought I could not do better than marry him; but, besides being old, he was ugly and disagreeable,--and wicked, I am sure, though my aunt scolded me for saying so; but she allowed he was no saint.

And there was another, less hateful, but still more tiresome, because she favoured him, and was always thrusting him upon me, and sounding his praises in my ears--Mr.Boarham by name, Bore'em, as I prefer spelling it, for a terrible bore he was: I shudder still at the remembrance of his voice--drone, drone, drone, in my ear--while he sat beside me, prosing away by the half-hour together, and beguiling himself with the notion that he was improving my mind by useful information, or impressing his dogmas upon me and reforming my errors of judgment, or perhaps that he was talking down to my level, and amusing me with entertaining discourse.