Vanity Fair quotes

bawling in front of their booths, and yokels looking up at the tinselled dancers and poor old rouged tumblers, while the light-fingered folk are operating upon their pockets behind.

Yes, this is Vanity Fair; not a moral place certainly; nor a merry one, though very noisy.

Look at the faces of the actors and buffoons when they come off from their business; and Tom Fool washing the paint off his cheeks before he sits down to dinner with his wife and the little Jack Puddings behind the canvas.

I have no other moral than this to tag to the present story of Vanity Fair. Some people consider Fairs immoral altogether, and eschew such, with their servants and families: very likely they are right.

But persons who think otherwise, and are of a lazy, or a benevolent, or a sarcastic mood, may perhaps like to step in for half an hour, and look at the performances.

There are scenes of all sorts; some dreadful combats, some grand and lofty horse-riding, some scenes of high life, and some of very middling indeed; some lovemaking for the sentimental, and some light comic business;

The embracing was over; they parted—that is, Miss Sedley parted from her friends. Miss Sharp had demurely entered the carriage some minutes before.

Nobody cried for leaving her.

Sambo of the bandy legs slammed the carriage door on his young weeping mistress. He sprang up behind the carriage. “Stop!” cried Miss Jemima, rushing to the gate with a parcel.

cried Miss Sedley; for this was the greatest blasphemy Rebecca had as yet uttered; and in those days, in England, to say, “Long live Bonaparte!” was as much as to say, “Long live Lucifer!” “How can you—how dare you have such wicked, revengeful thoughts?”

“Revenge may be wicked, but it’s natural,” answered Miss Rebecca. “I’m no angel.”

And, to say the truth, she certainly was not.

Miss Rebecca was not, then, in the least kind or placable. All the world used her ill, said this young misanthropist, and we may be pretty certain that persons whom all the world treats ill, deserve entirely the treatment they get.

The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face.

Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice.

By the side of many tall and bouncing young ladies in the establishment, Rebecca Sharp looked like a child.

But she had the dismal precocity of poverty.

Many a dun had she talked to, and turned away from her father’s door; many a tradesman had she coaxed and wheedled into good-humour, and into the granting of one meal more.

She sat commonly with her father, who was very proud of her wit, and heard the talk of many of his wild companions—often but ill-suited for a girl to hear.

But she never had been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since she was eight years old.

Oh, why did Miss Pinkerton let such a dangerous bird into her cage?

But she never had been a girl, she said; she had been a woman since she was eight years old.

Oh, why did Miss Pinkerton let such a dangerous bird into her cage?

The fact is, the old lady believed Rebecca to be the meekest creature in the world, so admirably, on the occasions when her father brought her to Chiswick, used Rebecca to perform the part of the ingénue;

… their mammas, recollect that Miss Sharp had no kind parent to arrange these delicate matters for her, and that if she did not get a husband for herself, there was no one else in the wide world who would take the trouble off her hands.

What causes young people to “come out,” but the noble ambition of matrimony?

What sends them trooping to watering-places? What keeps them dancing till five o’clock in the morning through a whole mortal season?

When dressed at length, in the afternoon, he would issue forth to take a drive with nobody in the Park; and then would come back in order to dress again and go and dine with nobody at the Piazza Coffeehouse.

He was as vain as a girl; and perhaps his extreme shyness was one of the results of his extreme vanity.

If Miss Rebecca can get the better of him, and at her first entrance into life, she is a young person of no ordinary cleverness.

The first move showed considerable skill. When she called Sedley a very handsome man, she knew that Amelia would tell her mother, who would probably tell Joseph, or who, at any rate, would be pleased by the compliment paid to her son.

All mothers are. If you had told Sycorax that her son Caliban was as handsome as Apollo, she would have been pleased, witch as she was.

Perhaps, too, Joseph Sedley would overhear the compliment—Rebecca spoke loud enough—and he did hear, and (thinking in his heart that he was a very fine man) the praise thrilled through every fibre of his big body, and made it tingle with pleasure.

We can’t resist them, if they do. Let them show ever so little inclination, and men go down on their knees at once: old or ugly, it is all the same. And this I set down as a positive truth.

A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry whom she likes.

Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don’t know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did.

old or ugly, it is all the same. And this I set down as a positive truth. A woman with fair opportunities, and without an absolute hump, may marry whom she likes.

Only let us be thankful that the darlings are like the beasts of the field, and don’t know their own power. They would overcome us entirely if they did.

“Egad!” thought Joseph, entering the dining-room, “I exactly begin to feel as I did at Dumdum with Miss Cutler.” Many sweet little appeals, half tender, half jocular, did Miss Sharp make to him about the dishes at dinner;

and if she does not catch him some other will. That man is destined to be a prey to woman, as I am to go on ’Change every day. It’s a mercy he did not bring us over a black daughter-in-law, my dear.

But, mark my words, the first woman who fishes for him, hooks him.

”

She had, too, in the course of this few days’ constant intercourse, warmed into a most tender friendship for Rebecca, and discovered a million of virtues and amiable qualities in her which she had not perceived when they were at Chiswick together.

For the affection of young ladies is of as rapid growth as Jack’s beanstalk, and reaches up to the sky in a night.

It is no blame to them that after marriage this Sehnsucht nach der Liebe subsides.

and Mr. William Dobbin retreated to a remote outhouse in the playground, where he passed a half-holiday in the bitterest sadness and woe. Who amongst us is there that does not recollect similar hours of bitter, bitter childish grief?

Who feels injustice; who shrinks before a slight; who has a sense of wrong so acute, and so glowing a gratitude for kindness, as a generous boy?

and how many of those gentle souls do you degrade, estrange, torture, for the sake of a little loose arithmetic, and miserable dog-latin?

I can’t tell what his motive was.

Torture in a public school is as much licensed as the knout in Russia.

It would be ungentlemanlike (in a manner) to resist it. Perhaps Dobbin’s foolish soul revolted against that exercise of tyranny;

And yet it is a chapter, and a very important one too.

Are not there little chapters in everybody’s life, that seem to be nothing, and yet affect all the rest of the history?

Let us then step into the coach with the Russell Square party, and be off to the Gardens. There is barely room between Jos and Miss Sharp, who are on the front seat. Mr. Osborne sitting bodkin opposite, between Captain Dobbin and Amelia.

He made the salad; and uncorked the champagne; and carved the chickens; and ate and drank the greater part of the refreshments on the tables. Finally, he insisted upon having a bowl of rack punch; everybody had rack punch at Vauxhall. “Waiter, rack punch.”

That bowl of rack punch was the cause of all this history. And why not a bowl of rack punch as well as any other cause?

Was not a bowl of prussic acid the cause of Fair Rosamond’s retiring from the world? Was not a bowl of wine the cause of the demise of Alexander the Great, or, at least, does not Dr.

… she thought of the dress she was to wear as bridesmaid, and of the presents which she should make to her nice little sister-in-law, and of a subsequent ceremony in which she herself might play a principal part, etc., and etc., and etc., and etc.

Oh, ignorant young creatures! How little do you know the effect of rack punch!

What is the rack in the punch, at night, to the rack in the head of a morning? To this truth I can vouch as a man; there is no headache in the world like that caused by Vauxhall punch.

Oh, ignorant young creatures! How little do you know the effect of rack punch!

What is the rack in the punch, at night, to the rack in the head of a morning?

To this truth I can vouch as a man; there is no headache in the world like that caused by Vauxhall punch. Through the lapse of twenty years, I can remember the consequence of two glasses! two wineglasses!

“A farthing a day is seven shillings a year,” answered the M.P.; “seven shillings a year is the interest of seven guineas.

Take care of your farthings, old Tinker, and your guineas will come quite nat’ral.

”

but this was a delight he could not forego; he had a savage pleasure in making the poor wretches wait, and in shifting from court to court and from term to term the period of satisfaction.

What’s the good of being in Parliament, he said, if you must pay your debts?

Hence, indeed, his position as a senator was not a little useful to him.

Miss Crawley was, in consequence, an object of great respect when she came to Queen’s Crawley, for she had a balance at her banker’s which would have made her beloved anywhere.

What a dignity it gives an old lady, that balance at the banker’s!

How tenderly we look at her faults if she is a relative (and may every reader have a score of such), what a kind good-natured old creature we find her!

Thus it was that our little romantic friend formed visions of the future for herself—nor must we be scandalised that, in all her castles in the air, a husband was the principal inhabitant.

Of what else have young ladies to think, but husbands? Of what else do their dear mammas think?

“I must be my own mamma,” said Rebecca; not without a tingling consciousness of defeat, as she thought over her little misadventure with Jos Sedley.

took an interest in his pamphlet on malt: was often affected, even to tears, by his discourses of an evening, and would say—“Oh, thank you, sir,” with a sigh, and a look up to heaven, that made him occasionally condescend to shake hands with her.

“Blood is everything, after all,” would that aristocratic religionist say.

“How Miss Sharp is awakened by my words, when not one of the people here is touched. I am too fine for them—too delicate. I must familiarise my style—but she understands it. Her mother was a Montmorency.”

Old Miss Crawley was certainly one of the reprobate. She had a snug little house in Park Lane, and, as she ate and drank a great deal too much during the season in London, she went to Harrowgate or Cheltenham for the summer.

She was the most hospitable and jovial of old vestals, and had been a beauty in her day, she said. (All old women were beauties once, we very well know.)

She was a bel esprit, and a dreadful Radical for those days. She had been in France (where St. Just, they say, inspired her with an unfortunate passion), and loved, ever after, French novels, French cookery, and French wines.

Rawdon, it was known, was to come in for the bulk of Miss Crawley’s property. These money transactions—these speculations in life and death—these silent battles for reversionary spoil—make brothers very loving towards each other in Vanity Fair.

I, for my part, have known a five-pound note to interpose and knock up a half century’s attachment between two brethren; and can’t but admire, as I think what a fine and durable thing Love is among worldly people.

It cannot be supposed that the arrival of such a personage as Rebecca at Queen’s Crawley, and her gradual establishment in the good graces of all people there, could be unremarked by Mrs. Bute Crawley. Mrs.

Mrs. Firkin (who was dressing the very small remnant of hair which remained on Miss Crawley’s pate), flung up her head and said, “I think Miss is very clever,” with the most killing sarcastic air.

In fact, Mrs. Firkin had that natural jealousy which is one of the main principles of every honest woman.

After rebuffing Sir Huddleston Fuddleston, Miss Crawley ordered that Rawdon Crawley should lead her in to dinner every day, and that Becky should follow with her cushion—or else she would have Becky’s arm and Rawdon with the pillow. “We must sit together,” she said.

“What’s that?” said Miss Crawley, interrupted in her after-dinner doze by the stoppage of the music.

“It’s a false note,” Miss Sharp said with a laugh; and Rawdon Crawley fumed with rage and mortification.

Seeing the evident partiality of Miss Crawley for the new governess, how good it was of Mrs.

… Mangnall’s Questions, and a ladylike knowledge of botany and geology, the knack of making poetry, the power of rattling sonatas in the Herz-manner, and so forth, are far more valuable endowments for a female, than those fugitive charms which a few years will inevitably tarnish.

It is quite edifying to hear women speculate upon the worthlessness and the duration of beauty.

But though virtue is a much finer thing, and those hapless creatures who suffer under the misfortune of good looks ought to be continually put in mind of the fate which awaits them;

“He was with his sister, most likely,” the Captain said. “Should he go and fetch the truant?” So she gave him her hand kindly and gratefully: and he crossed the square; and she waited and waited, but George never came.

Poor little tender heart! and so it goes on hoping and beating, and longing and trusting.

You see it is not much of a life to describe. There is not much of what you call incident in it. Only one feeling all day—when will he come? only one thought to sleep and wake upon.

And there are sweet modest little souls on which you light, fragrant and blooming tenderly in quiet shady places; and there are garden-ornaments, as big as brass warming-pans, that are fit to stare the sun itself out of countenance.

Miss Sedley was not of the sunflower sort; and I say it is out of the rules of all proportion to draw a violet of the size of a double dahlia.

No, indeed; the life of a good young girl who is in the paternal nest as yet, can’t have many of those thrilling incidents to which the heroine of romance commonly lays claim.

The fact is, peace was declared, Europe was going to be at rest; the Corsican was overthrown, and Lieutenant Osborne’s regiment would not be ordered on service. That was the way in which Miss Amelia reasoned.

The fate of Europe was Lieutenant George Osborne to her.

His dangers being over, she sang Te Deum. He was her Europe: her emperor: her allied monarchs and august prince regent. He was her sun and moon;

the Corsican was overthrown, and Lieutenant Osborne’s regiment would not be ordered on service. That was the way in which Miss Amelia reasoned. The fate of Europe was Lieutenant George Osborne to her. His dangers being over, she sang Te Deum.

He was her Europe: her emperor: her allied monarchs and august prince regent.

He was her sun and moon; and I believe she thought the grand illumination and ball at the Mansion House, given to the sovereigns, were especially in honour of George Osborne.

Miss Pinkerton would have tried to check this blind devotion very likely, had she been Amelia’s confidante; but not with much success, depend upon it. It is in the nature and instinct of some women.

Some are made to scheme, and some to love; and I wish any respected bachelor that reads this may take the sort that best likes him.

While under this overpowering impression, Miss Amelia neglected her twelve dear friends at Chiswick most cruelly, as such selfish people commonly will do. She had but this subject, of course, to think about;

and, in fine, gave the usual tokens of her condition. She wasn’t a heroine. Her letters were full of repetition. She wrote rather doubtful grammar sometimes, and in her verses took all sorts of liberties with the metre.

But oh, mesdames, if you are not allowed to touch the heart sometimes in spite of syntax, and are not to be loved until you all know the difference between trimeter and tetrameter, may all Poetry go to the deuce, and every schoolmaster perish miserably!

The very finest tree in the whole forest, with the straightest stem, and the strongest arms, and the thickest foliage, wherein you choose to build and coo, may be marked, for what you know, and may be down with a crash ere long.

What an old, old simile that is, between man and timber!

In the meanwhile, George kissed her very kindly on her forehead and glistening eyes, and was very gracious and good; and she thought his diamond shirt-pin (which she had not known him to wear before) the prettiest ornament ever seen.

The observant reader, who has marked our young Lieutenant’s previous behaviour, and has preserved our report of the brief conversation which he has just had with Captain Dobbin, has possibly come to certain conclusions regarding the character of Mr. Osborne.

Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated.

Perhaps the love is occasionally on the man’s side; perhaps on the lady’s. Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken insensibility for modesty, dullness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan.

Osborne. Some cynical Frenchman has said that there are two parties to a love-transaction: the one who loves and the other who condescends to be so treated. Perhaps the love is occasionally on the man’s side; perhaps on the lady’s.

Perhaps some infatuated swain has ere this mistaken insensibility for modesty, dullness for maiden reserve, mere vacuity for sweet bashfulness, and a goose, in a word, for a swan.

Perhaps some beloved female subscriber has arrayed an ass in the splendour and glory of her imagination; admired his dullness as manly simplicity; worshipped his selfishness as manly superiority;

When they brought her coffee, she started as though it were a cup of poison which Mr. Hicks, the butler, wished to propose to her. What mystery was there lurking?

Oh, those women! They nurse and cuddle their presentiments, and make darlings of their ugliest thoughts, as they do of their deformed children.

The gloom on the paternal countenance had also impressed George Osborne with anxiety. With such eyebrows, and a look so decidedly bilious, how was he to extract that money from the governor, of which George was consumedly in want? He began praising his father’s wine.

At dinner she was unusually brilliant and lively; but she would take no notice of the hints, or the nods, or the clumsy expostulations of the humiliated, infatuated guardsman. Skirmishes of this sort passed perpetually during the little campaign—tedious to relate, and similar in result.

The Crawley heavy cavalry was maddened by defeat, and routed every day.

If the Baronet of Queen’s Crawley had not had the fear of losing his sister’s legacy before his eyes, he never would have permitted his dear girls to lose the educational blessings which their invaluable governess was conferring upon them.

Like many wealthy people, it was Miss Crawley’s habit to accept as much service as she could get from her inferiors; and good-naturedly to take leave of them when she no longer found them useful.

Gratitude among certain rich folks is scarcely natural or to be thought of.

They take needy people’s services as their due. Nor have you, O poor parasite and humble hanger-on, much reason to complain! Your friendship for Dives is about as sincere as the return which it usually gets. It is money you love, and not the man;

They take needy people’s services as their due. Nor have you, O poor parasite and humble hanger-on, much reason to complain! Your friendship for Dives is about as sincere as the return which it usually gets.

It is money you love, and not the man; and were Croesus and his footman to change places you know, you poor rogue, who would have the benefit of your allegiance.

And I am not sure that, in spite of Rebecca’s simplicity and activity, and gentleness and untiring good humour, the shrewd old London lady, upon whom these treasures of friendship were lavished, had not a lurking suspicion all the while of her affectionate nurse and …

… I am not sure that, in spite of Rebecca’s simplicity and activity, and gentleness and untiring good humour, the shrewd old London lady, upon whom these treasures of friendship were lavished, had not a lurking suspicion all the while of her affectionate nurse and friend.

It must have often crossed Miss Crawley’s mind that nobody does anything for nothing.

If she measured her own feeling towards the world, she must have been pretty well able to gauge those of the world towards herself;

She went out of the world strengthened by such words and comfort as he could give her. For many years his was the only kindness she ever knew; the only friendship that solaced in any way that feeble, lonely soul.

Her heart was dead long before her body. She had sold it to become Sir Pitt Crawley’s wife. Mothers and daughters are making the same bargain every day in Vanity Fair.

When the demise took place, her husband was in London attending to some of his innumerable schemes, and busy with his endless lawyers.

How they were married is not of the slightest consequence to anybody. What is to hinder a Captain who is a major, and a young lady who is of age, from purchasing a licence, and uniting themselves at any church in this town?

Who needs to be told, that if a woman has a will she will assuredly find a way?

—My belief is that one day, when Miss Sharp had gone to pass the forenoon with her dear friend Miss Amelia Sedley in Russell Square, a lady very like her might have been seen entering a church in the City, in company with a gentleman …

… are we to expect a heavy dragoon with strong desires and small brains, who had never controlled a passion in his life, to become prudent all of a sudden, and to refuse to pay any price for an indulgence to which he had a mind?

If people only made prudent marriages, what a stop to population there would be!

It seems to me, for my part, that Mr. Rawdon’s marriage was one of the honestest actions which we shall have to record in any portion of that gentleman’s biography which has to do with the present history.

“How she sings—how she paints,” thought he. “How she rode that kicking mare at Queen’s Crawley!” And he would say to her in confidential moments, “By Jove, Beck, you’re fit to be Commander-in-Chief, or Archbishop of Canterbury, by Jove.”

Is his case a rare one? and don’t we see every day in the world many an honest Hercules at the apron-strings of Omphale, and great whiskered Samsons prostrate in Delilah’s lap?

When, then, Becky told him that the great crisis was near, and the time for action had arrived, Rawdon expressed himself as ready to act under her orders, as he would be to charge with his troop at the command of his colonel.

Who has not seen a woman hide the dullness of a stupid husband, or coax the fury of a savage one?

We accept this amiable slavishness, and praise a woman for it: we call this pretty treachery truth.

A good housewife is of necessity a humbug; and Cornelia’s husband was hoodwinked, as Potiphar was—only in a different way.

When he came home she was alert and happy: when he went out she pressed him to go: when he stayed at home, she played and sang for him, made him good drinks, superintended his dinner, warmed his slippers, and steeped his soul in comfort.

The best of women (I have heard my grandmother say) are hypocrites.

We don’t know how much they hide from us: how watchful they are when they seem most artless and confidential:

All his speculations had of late gone wrong with the luckless old gentleman. Ventures had failed; merchants had broken; funds had risen when he calculated they would fall. What need to particularize?

If success is rare and slow, everybody knows how quick and easy ruin is.

Old Sedley had kept his own sad counsel. Everything seemed to go on as usual in the quiet, opulent house; the good-natured mistress pursuing, quite unsuspiciously, her bustling idleness, and daily easy avocations;

or to feel that she had given her heart away too soon. Given once, the pure bashful maiden was too modest, too tender, too trustful, too weak, too much woman to recall it.

We are Turks with the affections of our women; and have made them subscribe to our doctrine too.

We let their bodies go abroad liberally enough, with smiles and ringlets and pink bonnets to disguise them instead of veils and yakmaks.

says prosperity to the poor devil battling in that black gulf. Who has not remarked the readiness with which the closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other of cheating when they fall out on money matters?

Everybody does it. Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.

Then Osborne had the intolerable sense of former benefits to goad and irritate him: these are always a cause of hostility aggravated. Finally, he had to break off the match between Sedley’s daughter and his son;

“You fool, why do you catch at a straw?” calm good sense says to the man that is drowning. “You villain, why do you shrink from plunging into the irretrievable Gazette?” says prosperity to the poor devil battling in that black gulf.

Who has not remarked the readiness with which the closest of friends and honestest of men suspect and accuse each other of cheating when they fall out on money matters?

Everybody does it. Everybody is right, I suppose, and the world is a rogue.

On George’s intercourse with Amelia he put an instant veto—menacing the youth with maledictions if he broke his commands, and vilipending the poor innocent girl as the basest and most artful of vixens.

One of the great conditions of anger and hatred is, that you must tell and believe lies against the hated object, in order, as we said, to be consistent.

When the great crash came—the announcement of ruin, and the departure from Russell Square, and the declaration that all was over between her and George—all over between her and love, her and happiness, her and faith in the world—a brutal letter from John Osborne told …

Miss B. would never have committed herself as that imprudent Amelia had done; pledged her love irretrievably; confessed her heart away, and got back nothing—only a brittle promise which was snapt and worthless in a moment.

A long engagement is a partnership which one party is free to keep or to break, but which involves all the capital of the other.

Be cautious then, young ladies; be wary how you engage. Be shy of loving frankly; never tell all you feel, or (a better way still), feel very little. See the consequences of being prematurely honest and confiding, and mistrust yourselves and everybody.

Get yourselves married as they do in France, where the lawyers are the bridesmaids and confidantes. At any rate, never have any feelings which may make you uncomfortable, or make any promises which you cannot at any required moment command and withdraw.

That is the way to get on, and be respected, and have a virtuous character in Vanity Fair.

If Amelia could have heard the comments regarding her which were made in the circle from which her father’s ruin had just driven her, she would have seen what her own crimes were, and how entirely her character was jeopardised. Such criminal imprudence Mrs.

Who was the blundering idiot who said that “fine words butter no parsnips”?

Half the parsnips of society are served and rendered palatable with no other sauce.

As the immortal Alexis Soyer can make more delicious soup for a halfpenny than an ignorant cook can concoct with pounds of vegetables and meat, so a skilful artist will make a few simple and pleasing phrases go farther than ever so much substantial benefit-stock …

Praise everybody, I say to such: never be squeamish, but speak out your compliment both point-blank in a man’s face, and behind his back, when you know there is a reasonable chance of his hearing it again.

Never lose a chance of saying a kind word.

As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in; so deal with your compliments through life. An acorn costs nothing; but it may sprout into a prodigious bit of timber.

Never lose a chance of saying a kind word. As Collingwood never saw a vacant place in his estate but he took an acorn out of his pocket and popped it in; so deal with your compliments through life.

An acorn costs nothing; but it may sprout into a prodigious bit of timber.

In a word, during Rawdon Crawley’s prosperity, he was only obeyed with sulky acquiescence; when his disgrace came, there was nobody to help or pity him. Whereas, when Mrs.

and the success or the pleasure of yesterday becomes of very small account when a certain (albeit uncertain) morrow is in view, about which all of us must some day or other be speculating.

O brother wearers of motley! Are there not moments when one grows sick of grinning and tumbling, and the jingling of cap and bells?

This, dear friends and companions, is my amiable object—to walk with you through the Fair, to examine the shops and the shows there; and that we should all come home after the flare, and the noise, and the gaiety, and be perfectly miserable in private.

had not the smallest remorse or compunction for the victim whom her tongue was immolating; nay, very likely thought her act was quite meritorious, and plumed herself upon her resolute manner of performing it.

Yes, if a man’s character is to be abused, say what you will, there’s nobody like a relation to do the business.

And one is bound to own, regarding this unfortunate wretch of a Rawdon Crawley, that the mere truth was enough to condemn him, and that all inventions of scandal were quite superfluous pains on his friends’ parts.

There were juvenile letters and petitions from Rebecca, too, in the collection, imploring aid for her father or declaring her own gratitude.

Perhaps in Vanity Fair there are no better satires than letters.

Take a bundle of your dear friend’s of ten years back—your dear friend whom you hate now. Look at a file of your sister’s! how you clung to each other till you quarrelled about the twenty-pound legacy!

or a parcel of your own, breathing endless ardour and love eternal, which were sent back by your mistress when she married the nabob—your mistress for whom you now care no more than for Queen Elizabeth.

Vows, love, promises, confidences, gratitude, how queerly they read after a while!

There ought to be a law in Vanity Fair ordering the destruction of every written document (except receipted tradesmen’s bills) after a certain brief and proper interval.

Those quacks and misanthropes who advertise indelible Japan ink should be made to perish along with their wicked discoveries.

The best ink for Vanity Fair use would be one that faded utterly in a couple of days, and left the paper clean and blank, so that you might write on it to somebody else.

From Miss Pinkerton’s the indefatigable Mrs. Bute followed the track of Sharp and his daughter back to the lodgings in Greek Street, which the defunct painter had occupied;

Dobbin was not a little affected by the sight of this once kind old friend, crazed almost with misfortune and raving with senile anger.

Pity the fallen gentleman: you to whom money and fair repute are the chiefest good; and so, surely, are they in Vanity Fair.

“Yes,” he continued, “there are some vipers that you warm, and they sting you afterwards. There are some beggars that you put on horseback, and they’re the first to ride you down. You know whom I mean, William Dobbin, my boy.

Hulkers; and, as we know, she was not the first woman who had been charmed by them. George had an air at once swaggering and melancholy, languid and fierce.

He looked like a man who had passions, secrets, and private harrowing griefs and adventures.

His voice was rich and deep. He would say it was a warm evening, or ask his partner to take an ice, with a tone as sad and confidential as if he were breaking her mother’s death to her, or preluding a declaration of love.

George had an air at once swaggering and melancholy, languid and fierce. He looked like a man who had passions, secrets, and private harrowing griefs and adventures. His voice was rich and deep.

He would say it was a warm evening, or ask his partner to take an ice, with a tone as sad and confidential as if he were breaking her mother’s death to her, or preluding a declaration of love.

He trampled over all the young bucks of his father’s circle, and was the hero among those third-rate men. Some few sneered at him and hated him. Some, like Dobbin, fanatically admired him.

“Here, you little beggars,” Dobbin said, giving some sixpences amongst them, and then went off by himself through the rain. It was all over. They were married, and happy, he prayed God.

Never since he was a boy had he felt so miserable and so lonely.

He longed with a heartsick yearning for the first few days to be over, that he might see her again.

It was that made me angry: and so pert: and so unkind: and so ungrateful. Do forgive me!” Rebecca said, and she held out her hand with so frank and winning a grace, that Osborne could not but take it.

By humbly and frankly acknowledging yourself to be in the wrong, there is no knowing, my son, what good you may do.

I knew once a gentleman and very worthy practitioner in Vanity Fair, who used to do little wrongs to his neighbours on purpose, and in order to apologise for them in an open and manly way afterwards—and what ensued?

They had credit in plenty, but they had bills also in abundance, and laboured under a scarcity of ready money. Did these debt-difficulties affect Rawdon’s good spirits? No.

Everybody in Vanity Fair must have remarked how well those live who are comfortably and thoroughly in debt: how they deny themselves nothing; how jolly and easy they are in their minds.

Rawdon and his wife had the very best apartments at the inn at Brighton; the landlord, as he brought in the first dish, bowed before them as to his greatest customers:

the landlord, as he brought in the first dish, bowed before them as to his greatest customers: and Rawdon abused the dinners and wine with an audacity which no grandee in the land could surpass.

Long custom, a manly appearance, faultless boots and clothes, and a happy fierceness of manner, will often help a man as much as a great balance at the banker’s.

The two wedding parties met constantly in each other’s apartments. After two or three nights the gentlemen of an evening had a little piquet, as their wives sat and chatted apart.

Nothing occurred during dinnertime except smiling Mr. Frederick’s flagging confidential whispers, and the clinking of plate and china, to interrupt the silence of the repast. The servants went about stealthily doing their duty.

Mutes at funerals could not look more glum than the domestics of Mr. Osborne.

The neck of venison of which he had invited Dobbin to partake, was carved by him in perfect silence; but his own share went away almost untasted, though he drank much, and the butler assiduously filled his glass.

all with red cheeks and large red mouths, simpering on each other in the approved family-portrait manner. The mother lay underground now, long since forgotten—the sisters and brother had a hundred different interests of their own, and, familiar still, were utterly estranged from each other.

Some few score of years afterwards, when all the parties represented are grown old, what bitter satire there is in those flaunting childish family-portraits, with their farce of sentiment and smiling lies, and innocence so self-conscious and self-satisfied.

Osborne’s own state portrait, with that of his great silver inkstand and armchair, had taken the place of honour in the dining-room, vacated by the family-piece.

Oh! thought she, I have been very wicked and selfish—selfish in forgetting them in their sorrows—selfish in forcing George to marry me. I know I’m not worthy of him—I know he would have been happy without me—and yet—I tried, I tried to give him up.

It is hard when, before seven days of marriage are over, such thoughts and confessions as these force themselves on a little bride’s mind.

But so it was, and the night before Dobbin came to join these young people—on a fine brilliant moonlight night of May—so warm and balmy that the windows were flung open to the balcony, from which George and Mrs.

The future, had she regarded it, offered a dismal prospect; but Emmy was too shy, so to speak, to look to that, and embark alone on that wide sea, and unfit to navigate it without a guide and protector.

I know Miss Smith has a mean opinion of her. But how many, my dear Madam, are endowed with your prodigious strength of mind?

“Gad, what a fine night, and how bright the moon is!” George said, with a puff of his cigar, which went soaring up skywards.

“It will hardly be enough to pay the inn bill,” grumbled the Guardsman.

“Why need we pay it?” said the lady, who had an answer for everything.

Through Rawdon’s valet, who still kept up a trifling acquaintance with the male inhabitants of Miss Crawley’s servants’ hall, and was instructed to treat the coachman to drink whenever they met, old Miss Crawley’s movements were pretty well known by our young couple;

That very day Miss Crawley left off her afternoon dose of medicine: that afternoon Bowls opened an independent bottle of sherry for himself and Mrs. Firkin: that night Miss Crawley and Miss Briggs indulged in a game of piquet instead of one of Porteus’s sermons.

It was as in the old nursery-story, when the stick forgot to beat the dog, and the whole course of events underwent a peaceful and happy revolution.

At a very early hour in the morning, twice or thrice a week, Miss Briggs used to betake herself to a bathing-machine, and disport in the water in a flannel gown and an oilskin cap.

The review of those days, so lately gone yet so far away, touched her with shame; and the aspect of the kind parents filled her with tender remorse.

Was the prize gained⁠—the heaven of life⁠—and the winner still doubtful and unsatisfied?

As his hero and heroine pass the matrimonial barrier, the novelist generally drops the curtain, as if the drama were over then: the doubts and struggles of life ended: as if, once landed in the marriage country, all were green and pleasant there:

Here she sat, and recalled to herself fondly that image of George to which she had knelt before marriage. Did she own to herself how different the real man was from that superb young hero whom she had worshipped?

It requires many, many years⁠—and a man must be very bad indeed⁠—before a woman’s pride and vanity will let her own to such a confession.

Then Rebecca’s twinkling green eyes and baleful smile lighted upon her, and filled her with dismay.

She went and knelt down by the bedside; and there this wounded and timorous, but gentle and loving soul, sought for consolation, where as yet, it must be owned, our little girl had but seldom looked for it.

Love had been her faith hitherto; and the sad, bleeding disappointed heart began to feel the want of another consoler.

Have we a right to repeat or to overhear her prayers? These, brother, are secrets, and out of the domain of Vanity Fair, in which our story lies.

Love had been her faith hitherto; and the sad, bleeding disappointed heart began to feel the want of another consoler.

Have we a right to repeat or to overhear her prayers? These, brother, are secrets, and out of the domain of Vanity Fair, in which our story lies.

But this may be said, that when the tea was finally announced, our young lady came downstairs a great deal more cheerful;

The miserable poor devils knew all about his affairs. They talked about them over their pints of beer at their public-house clubs to other clerks of a night.

Ye gods, what do not attorneys and attorneys’ clerks know in London! Nothing is hidden from their inquisition, and their families mutely rule our city.

Perhaps George expected, when he entered Mr. Higgs’s apartment, to find that gentleman commissioned to give him some message of compromise or conciliation from his father; perhaps his haughty and cold demeanour was adopted as a sign of his spirit and resolution:

At the mess-table he sat silently, and drank a great deal. When full of liquor, he reeled silently home. When he spoke, it was to agree with everybody on every conceivable point; and he passed through life in perfect ease and good-humour.

The hottest suns of India never heated his temper; and the Walcheren ague never shook it.

He walked up to a battery with just as much indifference as to a dinner-table; had dined on horseflesh and turtle with equal relish and appetite; and had an old mother, Mrs.

This is a species of dignity in which the high-bred British female reigns supreme.

To watch the behaviour of a fine lady to other and humbler women, is a very good sport for a philosophical frequenter of Vanity Fair.

This festival, on which honest George spent a great deal of money, was the very dismallest of all the entertainments which Amelia had in her honeymoon. She wrote the most piteous accounts of the feast home to her mamma:

The curses to which the General gave a low utterance, as soon as Rebecca and her conqueror had quitted him, were so deep, that I am sure no compositor would venture to print them were they written down.

They came from the General’s heart; and a wonderful thing it is to think that the human heart is capable of generating such produce, and can throw out, as occasion demands, such a supply of lust and fury, rage and hatred.

Amelia’s gentle eyes, too, had been fixed anxiously on the pair, whose conduct had so chafed the jealous General; but when Rebecca entered her box, she flew to her friend with an affectionate rapture which showed itself, in spite of the publicity of the place;

I am rather free about women, he had often said, smiling and nodding knowingly to Stubble and Spooney, and other comrades of the mess-table; and they rather respected him than otherwise for this prowess.

Next to conquering in war, conquering in love has been a source of pride, time out of mind, amongst men in Vanity Fair, or how should schoolboys brag of their amours, or Don Juan be popular?

So Mr. Osborne, having a firm conviction in his own mind that he was a woman-killer and destined to conquer, did not run counter to his fate, but yielded himself up to it quite complacently.

Where have you been, wretch? Here is Emmy crying her eyes out for you. Are you coming to fetch me for the quadrille?” And she left her bouquet and shawl by Amelia’s side, and tripped off with George to dance.

Women only know how to wound so. There is a poison on the tips of their little shafts, which stings a thousand times more than a man’s blunter weapon.

Our poor Emmy, who had never hated, never sneered all her life, was powerless in the hands of her remorseless little enemy.

We do not claim to rank among the military novelists. Our place is with the noncombatants. When the decks are cleared for action we go below and wait meekly.

We should only be in the way of the manoeuvres that the gallant fellows are performing overhead. We shall go no farther with the —th than to the city gate:

All the officers saluted her when the regiment marched by the balcony on which this brave woman stood, and waved them a cheer as they passed; and

I daresay it was not from want of courage, but from a sense of female delicacy and propriety, that she refrained from leading the gallant —th personally into action.

On Sundays, and at periods of a solemn nature, Mrs. O’Dowd used to read with great gravity out of a large volume of her uncle the Dean’s sermons.

After the regiment’s departure she betook herself to this volume for meditation; perhaps she did not understand much of what she was reading, and her thoughts were elsewhere: but the sleep project, with poor Mick’s nightcap there on the pillow, was quite a vain one.

So it is in the world. Jack or Donald marches away to glory with his knapsack on his shoulder, stepping out briskly to the tune of “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” It is she who remains and suffers⁠—and has the leisure to think, and brood, and remember.

Knowing how useless regrets are, and how the indulgence of sentiment only serves to make people more miserable, Mrs. Rebecca wisely determined to give way to no vain feelings of sorrow, and bore the parting from her husband with quite a Spartan equanimity.

Among the notes in Rawdon’s pocketbook was a draft for twenty pounds on Osborne’s banker. This made her think about Mrs. Osborne. “I will go and get the draft cashed,” she said, “and pay a visit afterwards to poor little Emmy.”

If this is a novel without a hero, at least let us lay claim to a heroine.

No man in the British army which has marched away, not the great Duke himself, could be more cool or collected in the presence of doubts and difficulties, than the indomitable little aide-de-camp’s wife.

Time out of mind strength and courage have been the theme of bards and romances; and from the story of Troy down to today, poetry has always chosen a soldier for a hero.

I wonder is it because men are cowards in heart that they admire bravery so much, and place military valour so far beyond every other quality for reward and worship?

So, at the sound of that stirring call to battle, George jumped away from the gentle arms in which he had been dallying;

The champion of his school and his regiment, the bravos of his companions had followed him everywhere; from the boys’ cricket-match to the garrison-races, he had won a hundred of triumphs; and wherever he went women and men had admired and envied him.

What qualities are there for which a man gets so speedy a return of applause, as those of bodily superiority, activity, and valour?

Time out of mind strength and courage have been the theme of bards and romances; and from the story of Troy down to today, poetry has always chosen a soldier for a hero.

But Mr. Joseph Sedley, luckily for his own peace, no more knew what was passing in his domestic’s mind than the respected reader, and I suspect what John or Mary, whose wages we pay, think of ourselves. What our servants think of us!—

Did we know what our intimates and dear relations thought of us, we should live in a world that we should be glad to quit, and in a frame of mind and a constant terror, that would be perfectly unbearable.

So Jos’s man was marking his victim down, as you see one of Mr. Paynter’s assistants in Leadenhall Street ornament an unconscious turtle with a placard on which is written, “Soup tomorrow.”

All Jos’s blood tingled with delight, as he surveyed this victim to his attractions. A few adroit words, one or two knowing tender glances of the eyes, and his heart was inflamed again and his doubts and suspicions forgotten.

From Solomon downwards, have not wiser men than he been cajoled and befooled by women?

“If the worst comes to the worst,” Becky thought, “my retreat is secure; and I have a right-hand seat in the barouche.”

How long had that poor girl been on her knees! what hours of speechless prayer and bitter prostration had she passed there!

The war-chroniclers who write brilliant stories of fight and triumph scarcely tell us of these.

These are too mean parts of the pageant: and you don’t hear widows’ cries or mothers’ sobs in the midst of the shouts and jubilation in the great Chorus of Victory. And yet when was the time that such have not cried out:

and she was the better of this control and company. They went on till two o’clock; their hearts were with the column as it marched farther and farther away. Dreadful doubt and anguish—prayers and fears and griefs unspeakable—followed the regiment.

It was the women’s tribute to the war. It taxes both alike, and takes the blood of the men, and the tears of the women.

At half-past two, an event occurred of daily importance to Mr. Joseph: the dinner-hour arrived. Warriors may fight and perish, but he must dine. He came into Amelia’s room to see if he could coax her to share that meal. “Try,” said he;

At half-past two, an event occurred of daily importance to Mr. Joseph: the dinner-hour arrived.

Warriors may fight and perish, but he must dine.

He came into Amelia’s room to see if he could coax her to share that meal. “Try,” said he; “the soup is very good. Do try, Emmy,” and he kissed her hand.

but he could get no more success than the first ambassador. “Send a lady’s maid to me!” Mrs. Crawley cried in great anger; “why didn’t my Lady Bareacres tell me to go and saddle the horses!

Is it her Ladyship that wants to escape, or her Ladyship’s femme de chambre?

” And this was all the answer that the Earl bore back to his Countess.

“why didn’t my Lady Bareacres tell me to go and saddle the horses! Is it her Ladyship that wants to escape, or her Ladyship’s femme de chambre?” And this was all the answer that the Earl bore back to his Countess.

What will not necessity do?

The Countess herself actually came to wait upon Mrs. Crawley on the failure of her second envoy. She entreated her to name her own price;

… frequency of her sarcasms upon Miss Briggs, all which attacks the poor companion bore with meekness, with cowardice, with a resignation that was half generous and half hypocritical—with the slavish submission, in a word, that women of her disposition and station are compelled to show.

Who has not seen how women bully women?

What tortures have men to endure, comparable to those daily repeated shafts of scorn and cruelty with which poor women are riddled by the tyrants of their sex? Poor victims!

and indeed, they were at music, or at backboard, or at geography, or at history, the whole day long.

But what avail all these accomplishments, in Vanity Fair, to girls who are short, poor, plain, and have a bad complexion?

Mrs. Bute could think of nobody but the Curate to take one of them off her hands;

And the way in which she jockeyed Jos, and which she described with infinite fun, carried up his delight to a pitch of quite insane enthusiasm.

He believed in his wife as much as the French soldiers in Napoleon.

Her success in Paris was remarkable. All the French ladies voted her charming. She spoke their language admirably. She adopted at once their grace, their liveliness, their manner.

Have you ever had a difference with a dear friend? How his letters, written in the period of love and confidence, sicken and rebuke you!

What a dreary mourning it is to dwell upon those vehement protests of dead affection!

What lying epitaphs they make over the corpse of love! What dark, cruel comments upon Life and Vanities! Most of us have got or written drawers full of them. They are closet-skeletons which we keep and shun.

Have you ever had a difference with a dear friend? How his letters, written in the period of love and confidence, sicken and rebuke you! What a dreary mourning it is to dwell upon those vehement protests of dead affection!

What lying epitaphs they make over the corpse of love!

What dark, cruel comments upon Life and Vanities! Most of us have got or written drawers full of them. They are closet-skeletons which we keep and shun. Osborne trembled long before the letter from his dead son.

What a dreary mourning it is to dwell upon those vehement protests of dead affection! What lying epitaphs they make over the corpse of love! What dark, cruel comments upon Life and Vanities! Most of us have got or written drawers full of them.

They are closet-skeletons which we keep and shun.

Osborne trembled long before the letter from his dead son.

He was proud of his hatred as of everything else.

Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes the lead in the world?

As after the drive to Waterloo, Mr. Osborne’s carriage was nearing the gates of the city at sunset, they met another open barouche, in which were a couple of ladies and a gentleman, and by the side of which an officer was riding.

It seemed a humiliation to old Osborne to think that his son, an English gentleman, a captain in the famous British army, should not be found worthy to lie in ground where mere foreigners were buried.

Which of us is there can tell how much vanity lurks in our warmest regard for others, and how selfish our love is?

Old Osborne did not speculate much upon the mingled nature of his feelings, and how his instinct and selfishness were combating together.

… first portion of that time in a sorrow so profound and pitiable, that we who have been watching and describing some of the emotions of that weak and tender heart, must draw back in the presence of the cruel grief under which it is bleeding.

Tread silently round the hapless couch of the poor prostrate soul.

Shut gently the door of the dark chamber wherein she suffers, as those kind people did who nursed her through the first months of her pain, and never left her until heaven had sent her consolation.

how she considered that the greatest favour she could confer upon his godfather, Major Dobbin, was to allow the Major occasionally to dandle him, need not be told here.

This child was her being. Her existence was a maternal caress.

She enveloped the feeble and unconscious creature with love and worship. It was her life which the baby drank in from her bosom.

The little pink hands of the child closed mechanically round the honest soldier’s finger, and Amelia looked up in his face with bright maternal pleasure.

The cruellest looks could not have wounded him more than that glance of hopeless kindness.

He bent over the child and mother. He could not speak for a moment. And it was only with all his strength that he could force himself to say a God bless you.

or the poor devil of a tailor whom the steward patronizes, and who has pledged all he is worth, and more, to get the liveries ready, which my lord has done him the honour to bespeak?

When the great house tumbles down, these miserable wretches fall under it unnoticed: as they say in the old legends, before a man goes to the devil himself, he sends plenty of other souls thither.

Rawdon and his wife generously gave their patronage to all such of Miss Crawley’s tradesmen and purveyors as chose to serve them. Some were willing enough, especially the poor ones.

With regard to the world of female fashion and its customs, the present writer of course can only speak at second hand.

A man can no more penetrate or understand those mysteries than he can know what the ladies talk about when they go upstairs after dinner.

It is only by inquiry and perseverance that one sometimes gets hints of those secrets;

Ruined! fiddlede-dee! I will get you a good place before that; or Pitt and his little boy will die, and we will be Sir Rawdon and my lady.

While there is life, there is hope, my dear, and I intend to make a man of you yet.

Who sold your horses for you? Who paid your debts for you?” Rawdon was obliged to confess that he owed all these benefits to his wife, and to trust himself to her guidance for the future.

and it was only by the strongest commands and entreaties on her part that he was brought into keeping a decent behaviour.

“You can’t shoot me into society,” she said good-naturedly.

“Remember, my dear, that I was but a governess, and you, you poor silly old man, have the worst reputation for debt, and dice, and all sorts of wickedness.

“How is Mrs. Crawley’s husband?” Lord Steyne used to say to him by way of a good day when they met; and indeed that was now his avocation in life.

He was Colonel Crawley no more. He was Mrs. Crawley’s husband.

About the little Rawdon, if nothing has been said all this while, it is because he is hidden upstairs in a garret somewhere, or has crawled below into the kitchen for companionship. His mother scarcely ever took notice of him.

Oh, thou poor lonely little benighted boy!

Mother is the name for God in the lips and hearts of little children; and here was one who was worshipping a stone!

Now Rawdon Crawley, rascal as the Colonel was, had certain manly tendencies of affection in his heart and could love a child and a woman still.

… still, hold you out a couple of fingers and patronize you in a pitying way—then you will know, as soon as your back is turned, that your friend begins with a “Poor devil, what imprudences he has committed, what chances that chap has thrown away!”

Well, well⁠—a carriage and three thousand a year is not the summit of the reward nor the end of God’s judgment of men.

If quacks prosper as often as they go to the wall—if zanies succeed and knaves arrive at fortune, and, vice versa, sharing ill luck and prosperity for all the world like the ablest and most honest amongst us—I say, brother, the gifts and pleasures of …

I don’t think they were unhappy.

Perhaps they were a little prouder in their downfall than in their prosperity.

Mrs. Sedley was always a great person for her landlady, Mrs. Clapp, when she descended and passed many hours with her in the basement or ornamented kitchen.

Perhaps the doctor’s lady had good reason for her jealousy: most women shared it, of those who formed the small circle of Amelia’s acquaintance, and were quite angry at the enthusiasm with which the other sex regarded her.

For almost all men who came near her loved her; though no doubt they would be at a loss to tell you why.

She was not brilliant, nor witty, nor wise over much, nor extraordinarily handsome. But wherever she went she touched and charmed every one of the male sex, as invariably as she awakened the scorn and incredulity of her own sisterhood.

It is the pretty face which creates sympathy in the hearts of men, those wicked rogues. A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face.

What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips and sweet accents render pleasant?

And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool. O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise.

A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face. What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips and sweet accents render pleasant?

And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool.

O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise.

What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips and sweet accents render pleasant? And so, with their usual sense of justice, ladies argue that because a woman is handsome, therefore she is a fool.

O ladies, ladies! there are some of you who are neither handsome nor wise.

These are but trivial incidents to recount in the life of our heroine. Her tale does not deal in wonders, as the gentle reader has already no doubt perceived;

Very likely Miss Binny was right to a great extent.

It is the pretty face which creates sympathy in the hearts of men, those wicked rogues.

A woman may possess the wisdom and chastity of Minerva, and we give no heed to her, if she has a plain face. What folly will not a pair of bright eyes make pardonable? What dullness may not red lips and sweet accents render pleasant?

Betsy Horrocks, quite daunted, flung herself down on her knees, bursting into tears.

But those who know a really good woman are aware that she is not in a hurry to forgive, and that the humiliation of an enemy is a triumph to her soul.

“Ring the bell, James,” Mrs. Bute said. “Go on ringing it till the people come.” The three or four domestics resident in the deserted old house came presently at that jangling and continued summons.

As for Sir Pitt he retired into those very apartments where Lady Crawley had been previously extinguished, and here was tended by Miss Hester, the girl upon her promotion, with constant care and assiduity.

What love, what fidelity, what constancy is there equal to that of a nurse with good wages?

They smooth pillows; and make arrowroot; they get up at nights; they bear complaints and querulousness; they see the sun shining out of doors and don’t want to go abroad; they sleep on armchairs and eat their meals in solitude;

and Law’s Serious Call or the Whole Duty of Man suffices them for literature for the year—and we quarrel with them because, when their relations come to see them once a week, a little gin is smuggled in in their linen basket.

Ladies, what man’s love is there that would stand a year’s nursing of the object of his affection?

Whereas a nurse will stand by you for ten pounds a quarter, and we think her too highly paid. At least Mr. Crawley grumbled a good deal about paying half as much to Miss Hester for her constant attendance upon the Baronet his father.

… present, would change at once, and she would make faces at him and clench her fist and scream out “Hold your tongue, you stupid old fool,” and twirl away his chair from the fire which he loved to look at—at which he would cry more.

For this was all that was left after more than seventy years of cunning, and struggling, and drinking, and scheming, and sin and selfishness⁠—a whimpering old idiot put in and out of bed and cleaned and fed like a baby.

At last a day came when the nurse’s occupation was over. Early one morning, as Pitt Crawley was at his steward’s and bailiff’s books in the study, a knock came to the door, and Hester presented herself, dropping a curtsey, and said,

… us who depart from the earth have an opportunity of revisiting it, I suppose he or she (assuming that any Vanity Fair feelings subsist in the sphere whither we are bound) would have a pang of mortification at finding how soon our survivors were consoled.

And so Sir Pitt was forgotten⁠—like the kindest and best of us⁠—only a few weeks sooner.

Those who will may follow his remains to the grave, whither they were borne on the appointed day, in the most becoming manner, the family in black coaches, with their handkerchiefs up to their noses, ready for the tears which did not come;

the undertaker and his gentlemen in deep tribulation; the select tenantry mourning out of compliment to the new landlord; the neighbouring gentry’s carriages at three miles an hour, empty, and in profound affliction; the parson speaking out the formula about “our dear brother departed.”

As long as we have a man’s body, we play our Vanities upon it, surrounding it with humbug and ceremonies, laying it in state, and packing it up in gilt nails and velvet; and we finish our duty by placing over it a stone, written all over with lies.

Bute’s curate, a smart young fellow from Oxford, and Sir Pitt Crawley composed between them an appropriate Latin epitaph for the late lamented Baronet, and the former preached a classical sermon, exhorting the survivors not to give way to grief and informing them in the …

If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbour?

A comfortable career of prosperity, if it does not make people honest, at least keeps them so.

An alderman coming from a turtle feast will not step out of his carriage to steal a leg of mutton; but put him to starve, and see if he will not purloin a loaf.

“It isn’t difficult to be a country gentleman’s wife,” Rebecca thought. “

I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year.

I could dawdle about in the nursery and count the apricots on the wall. I could water plants in a greenhouse and pick off dead leaves from the geraniums.

If you take temptations into account, who is to say that he is better than his neighbour? A comfortable career of prosperity, if it does not make people honest, at least keeps them so.

An alderman coming from a turtle feast will not step out of his carriage to steal a leg of mutton; but put him to starve, and see if he will not purloin a loaf.

Becky consoled herself by so balancing the chances and equalizing the distribution of good and evil in the world.

And for my part I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man’s moral senses—the very easiest to be deadened when wakened, and in some never wakened at all.

We grieve at being found out and at the idea of shame or punishment, but the mere sense of wrong makes very few people unhappy in Vanity Fair.

So Rebecca, during her stay at Queen’s Crawley, made as many friends of the Mammon of Unrighteousness as she could possibly bring under control. Lady Jane and her husband bade her farewell with the warmest demonstrations of goodwill.

“Oh so happy!” said Rebecca, throwing up the green eyes. She was immensely happy to be free of the place, and yet loath to go.

Queen’s Crawley was abominably stupid, and yet the air there was somehow purer than that which she had been accustomed to breathe.

Everybody had been dull, but had been kind in their way. “It is all the influence of a long course of Three Percents,” Becky said to herself, and was right very likely.

These people and their like gave the pompous Russell Square merchant pompous dinners back again. They had solemn rubbers of whist, when they went upstairs after drinking, and their carriages were called at half past ten.

Many rich people, whom we poor devils are in the habit of envying, lead contentedly an existence like that above described.

Jane Osborne scarcely ever met a man under sixty, and almost the only bachelor who appeared in their society was Mr. Smirk, the celebrated ladies’ doctor.

Not everybody is willing to pay even so much. To part with money is a sacrifice beyond almost all men endowed with a sense of order.

There is scarcely any man alive who does not think himself meritorious for giving his neighbour five pounds.

Thriftless gives, not from a beneficent pleasure in giving, but from a lazy delight in spending. He would not deny himself one enjoyment; not his opera-stall, not his horse, not his dinner, not even the pleasure of giving Lazarus the five pounds.

Thrifty, who is good, wise, just, and owes no man a penny, turns from a beggar, haggles with a hackney-coachman, or denies a poor relation, and I doubt which is the most selfish of the two.

Money has only a different value in the eyes of each.

So, in a word, Pitt Crawley thought he would do something for his brother, and then thought that he would think about it some other time.

Madam, your secret will be talked over by those men at their club at the public-house tonight. Jeames will tell Chawles his notions about you over their pipes and pewter beer-pots.

Some people ought to have mutes for servants in Vanity Fair⁠—mutes who could not write.

If you are guilty, tremble. That fellow behind your chair may be a Janissary with a bowstring in his plush breeches pocket. If you are not guilty, have a care of appearances, which are as ruinous as guilt.

Some people ought to have mutes for servants in Vanity Fair—mutes who could not write. If you are guilty, tremble. That fellow behind your chair may be a Janissary with a bowstring in his plush breeches pocket.

If you are not guilty, have a care of appearances, which are as ruinous as guilt.

“Was Rebecca guilty or not?” the Vehmgericht of the servants’ hall had pronounced against her.

He was glad to be employed of an errand; to go and make inquiries about a horse or a servant, or to carve the roast mutton for the dinner of the children. He was beat and cowed into laziness and submission.

Delilah had imprisoned him and cut his hair off, too.

The bold and reckless young blood of ten-years back was subjugated and was turned into a torpid, submissive, middle-aged, stout gentleman.

sir, they know the world.” And here, haply, a great man coming up, Tom Eaves’s hat would drop off his head, and he would rush forward with a bow and a grin, which showed that he knew the world too—in the Tomeavesian way, that is.

And having laid out every shilling of his fortune on an annuity, Tom could afford to bear no malice to his nephews and nieces, and to have no other feeling with regard to his betters but a constant and generous desire to dine with them.

Between the Marchioness and the natural and tender regard of mother for children, there was that cruel barrier placed of difference of faith.

“Brazil,” said one gossip to another, with a grin—“Brazil is St. John’s Wood. Rio de Janeiro is a cottage surrounded by four walls, and George Gaunt is accredited to a keeper, who has invested him with the order of the Strait-Waistcoat.”

These are the kinds of epitaphs which men pass over one another in Vanity Fair.

Twice or thrice in a week, in the earliest morning, the poor mother went for her sins and saw the poor invalid. Sometimes he laughed at her (and his laughter was more pitiful than to hear him cry);

the poor mother had brought it from her own ancient race. The evil had broken out once or twice in the father’s family, long before Lady Steyne’s sins had begun, or her fasts and tears and penances had been offered in their expiation.

The pride of the race was struck down as the firstborn of Pharaoh.

The dark mark of fate and doom was on the threshold—the tall old threshold surmounted by coronets and caned heraldry.

The feasts there were of the grandest in London, but there was not overmuch content therewith, except among the guests who sat at my lord’s table.

Had he not been so great a Prince very few possibly would have visited him; but in Vanity Fair the sins of very great personages are looked at indulgently.

“Nous regardons à deux fois” (as the French lady said) before we condemn a person of my lord’s undoubted quality. Some notorious carpers and squeamish moralists might be sulky with Lord Steyne, but they were glad enough to come when he asked them.

… applied for their restoration, but they retired into a little private repository, in an old desk, which Amelia Sedley had given her years and years ago, and in which Becky kept a number of useful and, perhaps, valuable things, about which her husband knew nothing.

To know nothing, or little, is in the nature of some husbands. To hide, in the nature of how many women?

Oh, ladies! how many of you have surreptitious milliners’ bills?

answered Mrs. Rawdon plaintively, and she rubbed her cheek with her handkerchief as if to show there was no rouge at all, only genuine blushes and modesty in her case. About this who can tell?

I know there is some rouge that won’t come off on a pocket-handkerchief, and some so good that even tears will not disturb it.

“Well,” said the old gentleman, twiddling round his wife’s card, “you are bent on becoming a fine lady. You pester my poor old life out to get you into the world. You won’t be able to hold your own there, you silly little fool.

“You’ve got no money, and you want to compete with those who have. You poor little earthenware pipkin, you want to swim down the stream along with the great copper kettles.

All women are alike. Everybody is striving for what is not worth the having!

Gad! I dined with the King yesterday, and we had neck of mutton and turnips. A dinner of herbs is better than a stalled ox very often. You will go to Gaunt House. You give an old fellow no rest until you get there.

And then indeed the little woman found herself in such a situation as made her acknowledge the correctness of Lord Steyne’s caution to her to beware of the society of ladies above her own sphere.

As they say, the persons who hate Irishmen most are Irishmen; so, assuredly, the greatest tyrants over women are women.

When poor little Becky, alone with the ladies, went up to the fireplace whither the great ladies had repaired, the great ladies marched away and took possession of a table of drawings.

He went and spoke to her, and called her by her Christian name, so as again to bring blushes to her pale face—“My wife says you have been singing like an angel,” he said to Becky.

Now there are angels of two kinds, and both sorts, it is said, are charming in their way.

Whatever the previous portion of the evening had been, the rest of that night was a great triumph for Becky. She sang her very best, and it was so good that every one of the men came and crowded round the piano.

All children were so: a little anxious for novelty, and—no, not selfish, but self-willed. Her child must have his enjoyments and ambition in the world. She herself, by her own selfishness and imprudent love for him had denied him his just rights and pleasures hitherto.

I know few things more affecting than that timorous debasement and self-humiliation of a woman.

How she owns that it is she and not the man who is guilty; how she takes all the faults on her side; how she courts in a manner punishment for the wrongs which she has not committed and persists in shielding the real culprit!

Tears had fallen into his boxes; passages had been scored in his favourite books; old toys, relics, treasures had been hoarded away for him, and packed with strange neatness and care—and of all these things the boy took no note.

The child goes away smiling as the mother breaks her heart.

By heavens it is pitiful, the bootless love of women for children in Vanity Fair.

passages had been scored in his favourite books; old toys, relics, treasures had been hoarded away for him, and packed with strange neatness and care—and of all these things the boy took no note. The child goes away smiling as the mother breaks her heart.

By heavens it is pitiful, the bootless love of women for children in Vanity Fair.

A few days are past, and the great event of Amelia’s life is consummated. No angel has intervened. The child is sacrificed and offered up to fate, and the widow is quite alone.

… of that estimable woman as regards fashion were settled, and some of the very greatest and tallest doors in the metropolis were speedily opened to her—doors so great and tall that the beloved reader and writer hereof may hope in vain to enter at them.

Dear brethren, let us tremble before those august portals.

I fancy them guarded by grooms of the chamber with flaming silver forks with which they prong all those who have not the right of the entrée.

They let the house as a furnished lodging now. Yes, Lady Hester once lived in Baker Street, and lies asleep in the wilderness. Eothen saw her there—not in Baker Street, but in the other solitude.

It is all vanity to be sure, but who will not own to liking a little of it?

I should like to know what well-constituted mind, merely because it is transitory, dislikes roast beef? That is a vanity, but may every man who reads this have a wholesome portion of it through life, I beg: aye, though my readers were five hundred thousand.

He looked often and wistfully at the little vacant bed in his dressing-room, where the child used to sleep. He missed him sadly of mornings and tried in vain to walk in the park without him.

He did not know how solitary he was until little Rawdon was gone.

He liked the people who were fond of him, and would go and sit for long hours with his good-natured sister Lady Jane, and talk to her about the virtues, and good looks, and hundred good qualities of the child.

… perhaps, if the truth must be told, he judged of Colonel Crawley by his experience of other husbands, whom he had known in the course of the long and well-spent life which had made him acquainted with a great deal of the weakness of mankind.

My lord had bought so many men during his life that he was surely to be pardoned for supposing that he had found the price of this one.

He taxed Becky upon the point on the very first occasion when he met her alone, and he complimented her, good-humouredly, on her cleverness in getting more than the money which she required. Becky was only a little taken aback.

He told me he had paid Miss Briggs; I did not want, I did not dare to doubt him. Pardon the wrong which a desperate man is forced to commit, and pity a miserable, miserable woman.” She burst into tears as she spoke.

Persecuted virtue never looked more bewitchingly wretched.

They had a long conversation, driving round and round the Regent’s Park in Mrs.

What had happened? Was she guilty or not? She said not, but who could tell what was truth which came from those lips, or if that corrupt heart was in this case pure?

All her lies and her schemes, and her selfishness and her wiles, all her wit and genius had come to this bankruptcy.

The woman closed the curtains and, with some entreaty and show of kindness, persuaded her mistress to lie down on the bed.

… do believe every hour of the day, and during most hours of the sad lonely nights, thinking of him, this young gentleman had a number of pleasures and consolations administered to him, which made him for his part bear the separation from Amelia very easily.

Little boys who cry when they are going to school cry because they are going to a very uncomfortable place.

It is only a few who weep from sheer affection.

Little boys who cry when they are going to school cry because they are going to a very uncomfortable place. It is only a few who weep from sheer affection.

When you think that the eyes of your childhood dried at the sight of a piece of gingerbread, and that a plum cake was a compensation for the agony of parting with your mamma and sisters, oh my friend and brother, you need not be too confident of your own fine feelings.

Well, then, Master George Osborne had every comfort and luxury that a wealthy and lavish old grandfather thought fit to provide.

It must be owned that he accommodated himself very willingly to this arrangement. Most people do so. And Georgy liked to play the part of master and perhaps had a natural aptitude for it.

In Russell Square everybody was afraid of Mr. Osborne, and Mr. Osborne was afraid of Georgy.

The boy’s dashing manners, and offhand rattle about books and learning, his likeness to his father (dead unreconciled in Brussels yonder) awed the old gentleman and gave the young boy the mastery.

love, labour, patience, watchfulness, without even so much as the acknowledgement of a good word; all this, how many of them have to bear in quiet, and appear abroad with cheerful faces as if they felt nothing.

Tender slaves that they are, they must needs be hypocrites and weak.

From her chair Amelia’s mother had taken to her bed, which she had never left, and from which Mrs. Osborne herself was never absent except when she ran to see George. The old lady grudged her even those rare visits;

The illness of that old lady had been the occupation and perhaps the safeguard of Amelia.

What do men know about women’s martyrdoms? We should go mad had we to endure the hundredth part of those daily pains which are meekly borne by many women.

Ceaseless slavery meeting with no reward; constant gentleness and kindness met by cruelty as constant; love, labour, patience, watchfulness, without even so much as the acknowledgement of a good word;

The hidden and awful Wisdom which apportions the destinies of mankind is pleased so to humiliate and cast down the tender, good, and wise, and to set up the selfish, the foolish, or the wicked.

Oh, be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less lucky, if not more deserving.

Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor’s accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.

Oh, be humble, my brother, in your prosperity! Be gentle with those who are less lucky, if not more deserving.

Think, what right have you to be scornful, whose virtue is a deficiency of temptation, whose success may be a chance, whose rank may be an ancestor’s accident, whose prosperity is very likely a satire.

They buried Amelia’s mother in the churchyard at Brompton, upon just such a rainy, dark day as Amelia recollected when first she had been there to marry George. Her little boy sat by her side in pompous new sables.

The landlord said it did his eyes good to see Mr. Sedley take off his first pint of porter. If I had time and dared to enter into digressions, I would write a chapter about that first pint of porter drunk upon English ground.

Ah, how good it is! It is worthwhile to leave home for a year, just to enjoy that one draught.

Major Dobbin made his appearance the next morning very neatly shaved and dressed, according to his wont. Indeed, it was so early in the morning that nobody was up in the house except that wonderful Boots of an inn who never seems to want sleep;

by old halls and parks; rustic hamlets clustered round ancient grey churches—and through the charming friendly English landscape. Is there any in the world like it?

To a traveller returning home it looks so kind⁠—it seems to shake hands with you as you pass through it.

Well, Major Dobbin passed through all this from Southampton to London, and without noting much beyond the milestones along the road. You see he was so eager to see his parents at Camberwell.

“Look there,” answered Miss Clapp, turning round and pointing; in which direction Amelia looking, saw Dobbin’s lean figure and long shadow stalking across the grass. Amelia started in her turn, blushed up, and, of course, began to cry.

At all this simple little creature’s fêtes, the grandes eaux were accustomed to play.

He looked at her—oh, how fondly—as she came running towards him, her hands before her, ready to give them to him. She wasn’t changed. She was a little pale, a little stouter in figure. Her eyes were the same, the kind trustful eyes.

That gentleman would not let the Bengalee rest until he had executed his promise of having a home for Amelia and his father.

Jos was a soft fellow in anybody’s hands, Dobbin most active in anybody’s concerns but his own

; the civilian was, therefore, an easy victim to the guileless arts of this good-natured diplomatist and was ready to do, to purchase, hire, or relinquish whatever his friend thought fit. Loll Jewab, of whom the boys about St.

He was the ami de la maison—old Sedley’s friend, Emmy’s friend, Georgy’s friend, Jos’s counsel and adviser. “He might almost as well be at Madras for anything we see of him,” Miss Ann Dobbin remarked at Camberwell.

Ah! Miss Ann, did it not strike you that it was not you whom the Major wanted to marry?

Joseph Sedley then led a life of dignified otiosity such as became a person of his eminence.

… neatly made—the cook will send or come up to ask about dinner—the survivor will soon bear to look at your picture over the mantelpiece, which will presently be deposed from the place of honour, to make way for the portrait of the son who reigns.

Which of the dead are most tenderly and passionately deplored? Those who love the survivors the least, I believe.

The death of a child occasions a passion of grief and frantic tears, such as your end, brother reader, will never inspire.

“Oh, Emmy, I’ve been thinking we were very unkind and unjust to you,” he said and put out his cold and feeble hand to her. She knelt down and prayed by his bedside, as he did too, having still hold of her hand.

When our turn comes, friend, may we have such company in our prayers!

Perhaps as he was lying awake then, his life may have passed before him—his early hopeful struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition—no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him—neither …

… struggles, his manly successes and prosperity, his downfall in his declining years, and his present helpless condition—no chance of revenge against Fortune, which had had the better of him—neither name nor money to bequeath—a spent-out, bootless life of defeat and disappointment, and the end here!

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed?

To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game?

Which, I wonder, brother reader, is the better lot, to die prosperous and famous, or poor and disappointed? To have, and to be forced to yield; or to sink out of life, having played and lost the game?

That must be a strange feeling, when a day of our life comes and we say, “Tomorrow, success or failure won’t matter much, and the sun will rise, and all the myriads of mankind go to their work or their pleasure as usual, but I shall be out of the turmoil.”

So there came one morning and sunrise when all the world got up and set about its various works and pleasures, with the exception of old John Sedley, who was not to fight with fortune, or to hope or scheme anymore, but to go and …

Which of these two speeches, think you, would be the best oration for your own funeral?

Old Sedley made the last; and in that humble frame of mind, and holding by the hand of his daughter, life and disappointment and vanity sank away from under him.

“You see,” said old Osborne to George, “what comes of merit, and industry, and judicious speculations, and that. Look at me and my banker’s account. Look at your poor Grandfather Sedley and his failure.

Look at me and my banker’s account. Look at your poor Grandfather Sedley and his failure. And yet he was a better man than I was, this day twenty years—a better man, I should say, by ten thousand pound.”

Beyond these people and Mr. Clapp’s family, who came over from Brompton to pay a visit of condolence, not a single soul alive ever cared a penny piece about old John Sedley, or remembered the existence of such a person.

When old Osborne first heard from his friend Colonel Buckler (as little Georgy had already informed us) how distinguished an officer Major Dobbin was, he exhibited a great deal of scornful incredulity and expressed his surprise how ever such a feller as that should possess …

And gratitude was all that she had to pay back for such admirable devotion and benefits—only gratitude! If she thought of any other return, the image of George stood up out of the grave and said, “You are mine, and mine only, now and forever.”

William knew her feelings: had he not passed his whole life in divining them?

When the nature of Mr. Osborne’s will became known to the world, it was edifying to remark how Mrs. George Osborne rose in the estimation of the people forming her circle of acquaintance.

One must do her that justice. But, que voulez vous?—in this vast town one has not the time to go and seek one’s friends; if they drop out of the rank they disappear, and we march on without them.

Who is ever missed in Vanity Fair?

But so, in a word, and before the period of grief for Mr. Osborne’s death had subsided, Emmy found herself in the centre of a very genteel circle indeed, the members of which could not conceive that anybody belonging to it was not very lucky.

whose want of meanness makes them simple; who can look the world honestly in the face with an equal manly sympathy for the great and the small?

We all know a hundred whose coats are very well made, and a score who have excellent manners, and one or two happy beings who are what they call in the inner circles, and have shot into the very centre and bull’s-eye of the fashion; but of gentlemen how many?

Let us take a little scrap of paper and each make out his list.

But have we not all been misled about our heroes and changed our opinions a hundred times? Emmy, in this happy time, found that hers underwent a very great change in respect of the merits of the Major.

Perhaps it was the happiest time of both their lives, indeed, if they did but know it⁠—and who does?

Which of us can point out and say that was the culmination—that was the summit of human joy? But at all events, this couple were very decently contented, and enjoyed as pleasant a summer tour as any pair that left England that year.

There are festivals and entertainments going continually on, and the Duke has his chamberlains and equerries, and the Duchess her mistress of the wardrobe and ladies of honour, just like any other and more potent potentates.

The Constitution is or was a moderate despotism, tempered by a Chamber that might or might not be elected.

I never certainly could hear of its sitting in my time at Pumpernickel. The Prime Minister had lodgings in a second floor, and the Foreign Secretary occupied the comfortable lodgings over Zwieback’s Conditorey.

… Turkish dresses with rouge on and wooden scimitars, or as Roman warriors with ophicleides and trombones—to see them again, I say, at night, after one had listened to them all the morning in the Aurelius Platz, where they performed opposite the café where we breakfasted.

Besides the band, there was a rich and numerous staff of officers, and, I believe, a few men.

Besides the regular sentries, three or four men, habited as hussars, used to do duty at the Palace, but I never saw them on horseback, and au fait, what was the use of cavalry in a time of profound peace?—and whither the deuce should the …

The number came up sure enough.

There is a power that arranges that, they say, for beginners.

“Thank you,” said she, pulling the money towards her, “thank you. What is your name?”

“Yes; ay nap after dinner,” said the mask archly. But Jos looking frightened, she continued, in her pretty French accent, “

You do not play to win. No more do I. I play to forget, but I cannot.

I cannot forget old times, monsieur. Your little nephew is the image of his father; and you—you are not changed—but yes, you are. Everybody changes, everybody forgets; nobody has any heart.”

And yet, madam, both are walking the world before our faces every day, without much shocking us.

If you were to blush every time they went by, what complexions you would have!

It is only when their naughty names are called out that your modesty has any occasion to show alarm or sense of outrage, and it has been the wish of the present writer, all through this story, deferentially to submit to the fashion at present …

but when they sink into their native element, depend on it, those mermaids are about no good, and we had best not examine the fiendish marine cannibals, revelling and feasting on their wretched pickled victims.

And so, when Becky is out of the way, be sure that she is not particularly well employed, and that the less that is said about her doings is in fact the better.

If we were to give a full account of her proceedings during a couple of years that followed after the Curzon Street catastrophe, there might be some reason for people to say this book was improper.

how he was thirteen years old, while little Alderney was but nine, fair, while the other darling was dark—in a word, caused the lady in question to repent of her good humour.

Whenever Becky made a little circle for herself with incredible toils and labour, somebody came and swept it down rudely, and she had all her work to begin over again.

It was very hard; very hard; lonely and disheartening.

Newbright and Mrs. Crawley ceased forthwith, and all the serious world of Tours, where this misfortune took place, immediately parted company with the reprobate.

Those who know the English Colonies abroad know that we carry with us us our pride, pills, prejudices, Harvey-sauces, cayenne-peppers, and other Lares, making a little Britain wherever we settle down.

From one colony to another Becky fled uneasily. From Boulogne to Dieppe, from Dieppe to Caen, from Caen to Tours—trying with all her might to be respectable, and alas!

From one colony to another Becky fled uneasily.

From Boulogne to Dieppe, from Dieppe to Caen, from Caen to Tours⁠—trying with all her might to be respectable, and alas! always found out some day or other and pecked out of the cage by the real daws.

Mrs. Hook Eagles took her up at one of these places—a woman without a blemish in her character and a house in Portman Square.

Rawdon, took her to live with her at her own house at Paris, quarrelled with the ambassador’s wife because she would not receive her protégée, and did all that lay in woman’s power to keep Becky straight in the paths of virtue and good repute.

Becky was very respectable and orderly at first, but the life of humdrum virtue grew utterly tedious to her before long.

It was the same routine every day, the same dullness and comfort, the same drive over the same stupid Bois de Boulogne, the same company of an evening, the same Blair’s Sermon of a Sunday night—the same opera always being acted over and over again;

… upon a boardinghouse existence and lived for some time at that famous mansion kept by Madame de Saint Amour, in the Rue Royale, at Paris, where she began exercising her graces and fascinations upon the shabby dandies and flyblown beauties who frequented her landlady’s salons.

Becky loved society and, indeed, could no more exist without it than an opium-eater without his dram

, and she was happy enough at the period of her boardinghouse life. “The women here are as amusing as those in May Fair,” she told an old London friend who met her, “only, their dresses are not quite so fresh.

and Eaves was certain that the unfortunate debutante in question was no other than Mrs. Rawdon Crawley.

She was, in fact, no better than a vagabond upon this earth.

When she got her money she gambled; when she had gambled it she was put to shifts to live; who knows how or by what means she succeeded? It is said that she was once seen at St.

Becky, too, knew some ladies here and there—French widows, dubious Italian countesses, whose husbands had treated them ill—faugh—what shall we say, we who have moved among some of the finest company of Vanity Fair, of this refuse and sediment of rascals?

If we play, let it be with clean cards, and not with this dirty pack.

But every man who has formed one of the innumerable army of travellers has seen these marauding irregulars hanging on, like Nym and Pistol, to the main force, wearing the king’s colours and boasting of his commission, but pillaging for themselves, and occasionally gibbeted by …

… at the time—(the same man who shot Prince Ravoli at Naples the next year, and was caned by Sir John Buckskin for carrying four kings in his hat besides those which he used in playing at écarté)—and this pair went into the rooms together, and

Becky saw a number of old faces which she remembered in happier days, when she was not innocent, but not found out.

Major Loder knew a great number of foreigners, keen-looking whiskered men with dirty striped ribbons in their buttonholes, and a very small display of linen; but his own countrymen, it might be remarked, eschewed the Major.

How was it that she had come to that little town? How was it that she had no friends and was wandering about alone?

Little boys at school are taught in their earliest Latin book that the path of Avernus is very easy of descent.

Let us skip over the interval in the history of her downward progress. She was not worse now than she had been in the days of her prosperity—only a little down on her luck.

Little boys at school are taught in their earliest Latin book that the path of Avernus is very easy of descent. Let us skip over the interval in the history of her downward progress.

She was not worse now than she had been in the days of her prosperity⁠—only a little down on her luck.

As for Mrs. Amelia, she was a woman of such a soft and foolish disposition that when she heard of anybody unhappy, her heart straightway melted towards the sufferer;

nor would she hear of anybody’s being deservedly unhappy. A world under such legislation as hers would not be a very orderly place of abode; but there are not many women, at least not of the rulers, who are of her sort.

This lady, I believe, would have abolished all gaols, punishments, handcuffs, whippings, poverty, sickness, hunger, in the world, and was such a mean-spirited creature that⁠—we are obliged to confess it⁠—she could even forget a mortal injury.

When the Major heard from Jos of the sentimental adventure which had just befallen the latter, he was not, it must be owned, nearly as much interested as the gentleman from Bengal. On the contrary, his excitement was quite the reverse from a pleasurable one;

nor would she hear of anybody’s being deservedly unhappy.

A world under such legislation as hers would not be a very orderly place of abode; but there are not many women, at least not of the rulers, who are of her sort.

This lady, I believe, would have abolished all gaols, punishments, handcuffs, whippings, poverty, sickness, hunger, in the world, and was such a mean-spirited creature that—we are obliged to confess it—she could even forget a mortal injury.