'...The gradations towards vice are almost imperceptible, and an experienced seducer can strew them with such enticing and agreeable flowers, as will lead the young sinner on insensibly, even to the most profligate stages of guilt. All therefore that can be done by virtue, unassisted with experience, is to avoid every trial with such a formidable foe, by declining and discouraging the first advances towards a particular correpondence with perfidious man, howsoever agreeable it may seem to be. For here is no security but in conscious weakness.'
from The Adventures of Count Fathom by Tobias Smollett (Chapter Thirty-Four)
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