Moll Flanders | Page 9

yet I
could not be better than where I was.
Here I continued till I was between seventeen and eighteen years old, and here I had all
the advantages for my education that could be imagined; the lady had masters home to

the house to teach her daughters to dance, and to speak French, and to write, and other to
teach them music; and I was always with them, I learned as fast as they; and though the
masters were not appointed to teach me, yet I learned by imitation and inquiry all that
they learned by instruction and direction; so that, in short, I learned to dance and speak
French as well as any of them, and to sing much better, for I had a better voice than any
of them. I could not so readily come at playing on the harpsichord or spinet, because I
had no instrument of my own to practice on, and could only come at theirs in the intervals
when they left it, which was uncertain; but yet I learned tolerably well too, and the young
ladies at length got two instruments, that is to say, a harpsichord and a spinet too, and
then they taught me themselves. But as to dancing, they could hardly help my learning
country-dances, because they always wanted me to make up even number; and, on the
other hand, they were as heartily willing to learn me everything that they had been taught
themselves, as I could be to take the learning.
By this means I had, as I have said above, all the advantages of education that I could
have had if I had been as much a gentlewoman as they were with whom I lived; and in
some things I had the advantage of my ladies, though they were my superiors; but they
were all the gifts of nature, and which all their fortunes could not furnish. First, I was
apparently handsomer than any of them; secondly, I was better shaped; and, thirdly, I
sang better, by which I mean I had a better voice; in all which you will, I hope, allow me
to say, I do not speak my own conceit of myself, but the opinion of all that knew the
family.
I had with all these the common vanity of my sex, viz. that being really taken for very
handsome, or, if you please, for a great beauty, I very well knew it, and had as good an
opinion of myself as anybody else could have of me; and particularly I loved to hear
anybody speak of it, which could not but happen to me sometimes, and was a great
satisfaction to me.
Thus far I have had a smooth story to tell of myself, and in all this part of my life I not
only had the reputation of living in a very good family, and a family noted and respected
everywhere for virtue and sobriety, and for every valuable thing; but I had the character
too of a very sober, modest, and virtuous young woman, and such I had always been;
neither had I yet any occasion to think of anything else, or to know what a temptation to
wickedness meant.
But that which I was too vain of was my ruin, or rather my vanity was the cause of it. The
lady in the house where I was had two sons, young gentlemen of very promising parts
and of extraordinary behaviour, and it was my misfortune to be very well with them both,
but they managed themselves with me in a quite different manner.
The eldest, a gay gentleman that knew the town as well as the country, and though he had
levity enough to do an ill-natured thing, yet had too much judgment of things to pay too
dear for his pleasures; he began with the unhappy snare to all women, viz. taking notice
upon all occasions how pretty I was, as he called it, how agreeable, how well-carriaged,
and the like; and this he contrived so subtly, as if he had known as well how to catch a
woman in his net as a partridge when he went a-setting; for he would contrive to be

talking this to his sisters when, though I was not by, yet when he knew I was not far off
but that I should be sure to hear him. His sisters would return softly to him, 'Hush,
brother, she will hear you; she is but in the next room.' Then he would put it off and talk
softlier, as if he had not know it, and begin to acknowledge he was wrong; and then, as if
he had forgot himself, he would speak aloud again, and I, that was so well pleased to hear
it, was