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She tried with a desperate fierceness to make herself like the man before her, to put away, by sheer power of will, all memory, the knowledge of everything save what was in this little room, but it was the vainest of all vain efforts. She saw herself for a thief and a cheat stealing, for love's sake, the mere body of the man she loved while mind and soul were absent.

He wrote as follows to his sister Laure, the habitual recipient of his confidences: "I found down yonder all that is needed to flatter the thousand vanities of that animal known as man, of which species the poet still remains the vainest variety. But why do I use the word vanity? No, that has nothing to do with it.

"Yes, Paris must be a taking place," said Humphrey. "Grand shop-winders, trumpets, and drums; and here be we out of doors in all winds and weathers " "But you mistake me," pleaded Clym. "All this was very depressing. But not so depressing as something I next perceived that my business was the idlest, vainest, most effeminate business that ever a man could be put to.

The little boy from the Bastille was achieving the supreme peak of greatness he was about to live away from business. Soon he would be `going down to business' of a morning. Soon he would be receiving two separate demand-notes for rates. Soon he would be on a plane with the vainest earthenware manufacturer of them all. Ages ago he had got as far as a house with a lobby to it.

'The frog-faced' Marquis, the vainest of men, was one of the most courageous. Their daughters became the Princesses de Montauban and de Ligne, whose brilliant marriages caused much envy. Of their sons we shall hear later. Olive, the Regent's mistress, was 'the great wheel of the machine, in which Fanny 'had her corner, at Saint Germains.

Even the vainest opinions of men are not to be outraged by those who propose to themselves the happiness of men for their end, and who must work with the passions of men for their means. The blind reverence for things ancient is indeed so foolish that it might make a wise man laugh, if it were not also sometimes so mischievous that it would rather make a good man weep.

The churchmen, who had never gone heartily into Napoleon's ecclesiastical arrangements, sided of course with these impoverished and haughty lords; and, in a word, the first tumult of the restoration being over, the troops of the Allies withdrawn, and the memory of recent sufferings and disasters beginning to wax dim amidst the vainest and most volatile of nations, there were abundant elements of discontent afloat among all those classes who had originally approved of, or profited by, the revolution of 1792.

There had been days, and those not so long ago, when so hazardous an Odyssey had seemed the vainest of Blue Moon ambitions; it had once been the only rule of existence to sprawl and roll and sprawl again; but gradually some further force had stirred his limbs. It was a finer thing to be upright; there was a finer view, a more lordly sense of possession could be summoned to one's command.

Had she not possessed it, it would to her mind have been the vainest of pretences. When Mary came in, the wedding preparations were being discussed. The number and names of the bridesmaids were being settled, the dresses were on the tapis, the invitations to be given were talked over.

If France exceeds us in that particular, the incomparable author of L'Esprit des Loix accounts for it very impartially, and I believe very truly. "If my countrymen," says he, "are the best bred people in the world, it is only because they are the vainest." It is certain that their good-breeding and attention, by flattering the vanity and self-love of others, repay their own with interest.