The Cords of Vanity quotes

“For in September,” she said, “I really must have perfect quiet and unimpeachable butter, and falling leaves, and only a very few congenial people to be melancholy with—and that sort of thing, you know. I find it freshens one up so against the winter.”

It was a signal feature of my mother’s conversation that you never understood, precisely, what she was talking about.

Thus in her train the silly, pretty woman drew otherwhither her hobbledehoy son, as indeed Claire Bulmer Townsend had aforetime drawn an armament of more mature and stolid members of my sex.

… Her father taught me Latin at King’s College, while Bettie taught me human intimacy—almost.

Looking back, I have not ever been intimate with anybody.⁠ ⁠…

Not but that I had my friends. In particular I remember those four of us who always called ourselves—in flat defiance, just as Dumas did, of mere arithmetic—“The Three Musketeers.”

“—For, the mere facts of the case she plainly demonstrates, with the abettance of her dimples, to be an affair of unimportance; the real point is what she wishes done about it.

Yet the proffering of any particular piece of advice does not necessarily signify that she either expects or wishes it to be followed, since had she been present at the Creation she would have cheerfully pointed out to the Deity His various mistakes

, and have offered her cooperation toward bettering matters, and have thought a deal less of Him had He accepted it; but this is merely a habit—”

“

Nor does anything else. This fact is the chief charm of life.

You will presently find, I think, that living means a daily squandering of interest upon the first half of a number of two-part stories which have not ever any sequel.

“Then were you the more unwise.

To forget, both speedily and frequently, is the sole method of rendering life livable.

One is here; the importance of the fact in the eternal scheme of things is perhaps a shade more trivial than one is disposed to concede, but in any event, one is here;

“

The Only Woman has a way of leaving many heirs, Mr. Townsend, that play the deuce with the estate.

”

Oh, the brave woman who had followed! Oh, the brave, foolish woman! And, for the action’s recompense, he was content to exhibit her to yokels, to make of her beauty an article of traffic.

Heine was right; there is an Aristophanes in heaven.

And then hope blazed.

“Oh, ‘people!’ ” Charteris flung out, in an extremity of scorn. “

Since time was young, a generally incompetent humanity has been willing to pardon anything rather than the maddening spectacle of labour competently done.

And they are perfectly right; it is abominable how such weak-minded persons occasionally thrust themselves into a world quite obviously designed for persons who have not any minds at all. But I was not asking you to write a ‘bestseller.’ ”

And you cannot hope for an audience of even moderately intelligent persons, because intelligent persons do not attempt to keep abreast with modern fiction.

It is probably ascribable to the fact that they enjoy being intelligent, and wish to remain so.

“You sneer at the ‘bestsellers.’ I tell you, in sober earnest, that the writing of a frankly trashy novel which will ‘sell,’ is the highest imaginable form of art. For true art, in its last terms, is the adroit circumvention of an unsurmountable obstacle.

She told me not long after this, “When I saw Gladys loved you, of course I loved you too.”

And I hereby soberly record the statement that to have a woman fall thoroughly in love with him is the most uncomfortable experience which can ever befall any man.

I am tolerably sure I never made any amorous declaration. Rather, it simply bewildered me to observe the shameless and irrational infatuation this woman presently bore for me, and before it I was powerless.

For she is to each man the one woman that he might have loved perfectly.

She is as old as youth, she is more old than April even, and she is as ageless.

And, again like youth and April, this Helen goes about the world in varied garments, and to no two men is her face the same. Oh, very often she transmutes her fleshly covering.

but these futilities did no good at all.

Lichfield had got at and into me when I was too young to defend myself; and I could no more alter the inbred traditions of Lichfield, that were a part of me, than a carpet could change its texture.

My traditions merely told me that the dear woman whom I remembered had come—in fleeing from discomforts which were unbearable, if that mattered—to be Von Anspach’s harlot: and finding her this, my traditions declined to be the least bit broadminded.

and if only I were a milliner, I would describe for you that gown in some not unbefitting fashion. As it is, you may draft the world’s modistes to dredge the dictionary, and they will fail, as ignominiously as I would do, in the attempt.

For, after all, its greatest charm was that it contained Stella, and converted Stella into a marquise

—not such an one as was her sister, the Marquise d’Arlanges, but a marquise out of Watteau or of Fragonard, say.

Silence. I stirred my tea.

“Dear Peter!” said she.

And then—but unless a woman of Stella’s sort is able to exercise a proper control over her countenance, she has absolutely no right to discuss her husband with his bachelor friends. It is unkind;

Stella was calling for Peter. We manufactured explanations.

Nice customs curtsey to death.

I am standing at Stella’s bedside, and the white-capped nurse has gone. There are dim lights about the room, and heavy carts lumber by in the dawn without. A petulant sparrow is cheeping somewhere.

It was very odd to see Bettie again.

I had been sublimely confident, though, that we would pick up our intercourse precisely where we had left off; and this, as I now know, is something which can never happen to anybody.

So I was vaguely irritated before we had finished shaking hands, and became so resolutely boyish and effusive in my delight at seeing her that anyone in the world but Bettie Hamlyn would have been quite touched.

Then, alone, you may write the necessary character studies which will be sufficiently abundant in human interest.

For, at bottom, any one of us is tediously like any other. Comprehension is the grave of sympathy; scratch deeply enough and you will find not any livelily-coloured Tartarism, but just a mediocre and thoroughly uninteresting human being.

So I may not ever be so droll as I had meant to be; and if you wish to chuckle over the grotesque places I have lived in, you must apply to persons who have spent two weeks there, and no more.

I ought to have been content with this. But I had somehow contracted an insane notion that a novel is the more enjoyable when it is adroitly written.

In point of fact, of course, no man who writes with care is ever read with pleasure; you may toil through a page or two perhaps, but presently you are noting how precisely every word is fitted to the thought, and later you are noting nothing else.

You are insensibly beguiled into a fidgety-footed analysis of every clause, which fatigues in the outcome, and by the tenth page you are yawning.

And by this time the windows are pale blue, like the blue of a dying flame, and you peep out and see the sparrows moving like rather poorly made mechanical toys about the middle of the deserted street, where there is neither light nor shade.

The colour of everything is perfectly discernible, but there is no lustre in the world as yet, though yonder the bloat sun is already visible in the blue and red east, which is like a cosmic bruise

; and upon a sudden you find it just possible to stay awake long enough to get safely into bed. …

“Oh, the adorable jade!” I said; and then: “George Glock, forsooth! George Dandin, tu l’ as voulu.”

Naturally I put the entire affair into a short story.

And—though even to myself it seems incredible—Miss Winwood wrote me within three days of the tale’s appearance, a very indignant letter.

So Rosalind went on calling me Jaques; and I was compelled to put up with a trivial and unpremeditated, but for all that a daily, annoyance; and I fretted under it.

Item, she insisted on presenting me with all sorts of expensive knickknacks, and being childishly grieved when I remonstrated.

“But I have the money,” Rosalind would say, “and you haven’t. So why shouldn’t I? And besides, it’s really only selfishness on my part, because I like doing things for you, and if you liked doing things for me, Jaques, you’d understand.”

but at the bottom of my heart I know the concession is simply verbal. For she was not pretty; she was not handsome; she was beautiful.

Indeed, I sometimes thought her beauty overshadowed any serious consideration of the woman who wore it, just as in admiration of a picture you rarely think to wonder what sort of canvas it is painted on.

Yes, I am quite sure, upon reflection, that to Elena Barry-Smith her beauty was a sort of tyrant. She devoted her life, I think, to the retention of her charms;

Or perhaps it is going to be a dream. She can’t be real, you know—I am probably just dreaming her. I would be quite certain I was just dreaming her, if this wall were not so humpy and uncomfortable. For it stands to reason,

I would not be fool enough to dream of such unsympathetic iron spikes as I am sitting on.

”

Simply feast your eyes upon those orderly clipped trees and the fantastic patterns those flowers are laid out in!

Why, upon my word, it looks as if all four books of Euclid had suddenly burst into blossom!

And you ask me if I would care! Ah, it is evident you are not a connoisseur in gardens, Miss Beechinor!”

And then, and not till then, my heart consented to resume its normal functions. And then, also, “These iron spikes—” said its owner.

“Are they?” said she. “Why, then, how silly of you to continue to sit on them!”

The result of this comment was that we were both late for luncheon.

But the problem, like the puzzle of the Eleatic philosophers, had solved itself.

“Achilles cannot catch the tortoise,” but he does.

It was impossible for me to fall uncomfortably deep in love—but I had done so.

I laughed at that. “

Sensible! If there is one thing more absurd than another in this very absurd world, it is common sense.

Be sensible and you will be miserable, Avis, not to mention being disliked. Sensible! Why, of course, it is not sensible.

… she could take aromatic spirits of ammonia and point out between doses that she has given up her entire life to her child and has never made any demands on her and hasn’t the strength to argue with her, because her heart is simply broken.

We mothers always say that; and the funny part is that if you say it often enough it invariably works far better than any possible argument.

”

“That is what I’m grumbling about.

I consider it very unfeeling of you to write better novels than I do,

” I retorted. “But, oh, how good that scene is!” I said, a little later.

Then she said: “I only hope she had the civility and self-control not to laugh until you had gone away. And ‘We irrelevant folk that design all useless and beautiful things,’ indeed! No, I couldn’t have blamed her if she laughed right out.

I wonder if you will never understand that what you take to be your love for beautiful things is really just a dislike of ugly ones?

Oh, I’ve no patience with you! And wanting to print it in a book, too, instead of being content to make yourself ridiculous in tête-à-têtes with minxes that don’t especially matter!”

“I am in love with Avis—oh, granted! I am not the least bit in love with—we will euphemistically say ‘anyone else.’ But confound it!

I am coming to the conclusion that marrying a woman because you happen to be in love with her is about as logical a proceeding as throwing the cat out of the window because the rhododendrons are in bloom.

Why, if I marry Avis I shall probably have to live with her the rest of my life!

So I went home at half-past seven, to supper and to Bettie, in a quite contented frame of mind.

It did not seem conceivable that any world so beautiful and stupid and well-meaning could have either the heart or the wit to thwart my getting anything I really wanted; and the thought elated me.

Only I did not know, precisely, what I wanted.

It did not seem conceivable that any world so beautiful and stupid and well-meaning could have either the heart or the wit to thwart my getting anything I really wanted; and the thought elated me.

Only I did not know, precisely, what I wanted.

I paused to whistle.

“There is strange milk in this coconut, could I but discern its nature.”

I did, some four weeks later, when with a deal of mail I received the last letter I was ever to receive from Avis Beechinor.

It is the solitary way of explaining certain people—that they were invented by some fagged novelist who unfortunately died before he finished the book they were to be locked up in. As it was, they got loose, to annoy you by their incredibility.

No actual human being, you know, would suggest a white shirtwaist as a substitute for a box of candy.

”

And she was silent for a while. “Robin,” she said, at last, “you’ll never understand why women like you.

You will always think it is because they admire you for some quality or another. It is really because they pity you.

You are such a baby, riding for a fall—No, I don’t mean the boyishness you trade upon. I have known for a long while all that was just put on. And, oh, how hard you’ve tried to be a boy of late!”

It is because you are none of these things that it counts for so much to see you honest with me—sometimes—and even to see you scheming and playacting—and so transparently!—just to bring about a little pleasure for me.

Oh, Robin, I am afraid that nowadays I love you because of your vices!

”

What, have you never noticed that with ‘people,’ to eat mutton once a week is a sort of guarantee of respectability? I do not refer to chops of course, which are not wholly inconsistent with depravity.

But the ability to eat mutton in its roasted form, by some odd law of nature, connotes the habit of paying your pew-rent regularly and of changing your flannels on the proper date.

However, I was telling you about Jasper Hardress—” And Charteris repeated the story of their imbroglio in such a fashion that it sounded farcical.

“I hate that wizened man,” she presently volunteered, “more bitterly than I do any person on earth.

For it was he who taught you to adopt infancy as a profession.

He robbed me. And Setebos permitted it. And now you are just a man I am going to marry—Oh, well!” said Bettie, more sprightlily, “I was getting on, and you are rather a dear even in that capacity.

He robbed me. And Setebos permitted it. And now you are just a man I am going to marry—Oh, well!” said Bettie, more sprightlily, “I was getting on, and you are rather a dear even in that capacity.

Only I wonder what becomes of all the first choices?

”

But we must avoid all sickly sentiment.

You see the world had advanced since Stella died⁠—twice around the sun, from solstice to solstice, from spring to winter and back again, travelling through I forget how many millions of miles

; and there had been wars and scandals and a host of debutantes and any number of dinners; and, after all, the world is for the living.

and so, a little by a little, we forgot our poor, dear Stella in precisely the decorous graduations of regret with which our poor dear Stella would have forgotten any one of us.

Yes, even those who loved her most deeply have forgotten Stella. They remember only an imaginary being who was entirely perfect, and of whom they were not worthy.

It is this fictitious woman who has usurped the real Stella’s place in the heart of the real Stella’s own mother, and whom even Lizzie d’Arlanges believes to have been once her sister, and over whom Peter Blagden is always ready to grow maudlin;

and it is this immaculate woman—who never existed—that will be until the end of Avis’ matrimonial existence the standard by which Avis is measured and found wanting.

And thus again the whirligig of time, by an odd turn, brings in his revenges.

And I? Well, I was very fond of Stella. And the woman they speak of today, in that hushed, hateful, sanctimonious voice, I must confess I never knew.

And I? Well, I was very fond of Stella.

It would be good to have her back⁠—to have her back to jeer at me, to make me feel red and uncomfortable and ridiculous, to say rude things about my waist, and indeed to fluster me just by being there.

Yes, it would be good. But, upon the whole, I am not sorry that Stella is gone.