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Oh, my Flavia! my poor Flavia! your weakness of to-day will yet cost you very dear!" Paul remained rooted to the ground, with an expression of surprise and confusion upon every line of his face. All his pride and vanity had gone. "I wonder," muttered he, "what these disagreeable persons are saying about me? Perhaps laughing at my inexperience and ridiculing my aspirations."
So she sat there, dragon-like, hour after hour, knitting away with her little fat hands, while Louie posed, and Montjoie worked; and groups of the sculptor's friends came in and out, providing the audience which excited the ambition of the man and the vanity of the girl. So the days passed.
One of them bears upon the question of language. I have always felt myself looked upon somewhat in the light of a phenomenon, a position which outside the circus world cannot be regarded as desirable. It needs a special temperament for one to derive much gratification from the fact of being able to do freakish things intentionally, and, as it were, from mere vanity.
"And then as he is helping me down, with his heart in a flutter, it will flutter, I assure you." "You mean his vanity; but it's of no consequence. He'd call it a heart if he were putting the scene in a novel." "With his whichever it is in a flutter, by some provoking accident down comes my hair and tumbles over his shoulders." Wilson regarded her with amused admiration.
"For such foolish vanity I ought to punish you severely, so that you would stop forever your senseless writings, saving me the trouble of coming to reprimand you at every instance. "Were I to judge you according to your own theory, you should at least go to your Purgatory. But, after all, you are not so bad, as many learned persons are made to laugh at your writings.
'Ah, there is a man with whom I shall get on. He has the good-nature of success and none of the morgue; he has not our confoundedly irritable French vanity. In short, I took a fancy to you. We are very different, I'm sure; I don't believe there is a subject on which we think or feel alike. But I rather think we shall get on, for there is such a thing, you know, as being too different to quarrel."
He looked on him as a danger to the Empire, to be fought against, to be resisted, to be crushed. Nor was he singular in this. It is customary to speak of the extraordinary influence which Gladstone exercised. It was this influence, directed by sentiment or by vanity, which constituted the danger.
For this, indeed, I hold myself responsible; if I get in my own way; if there be any vanity and defect in my writings which I do not of myself perceive nor can discern, when pointed out to me by another; for many faults escape our eye, but the infirmity of judgment consists in not being able to discern them, when by another laid open to us.
The crown of martyrdom disappeared, the wounded vanity healed; that precious fund of fictitious resignation drained away, but left no void.
He seemed in talk aggressive, petulant, full of a singular energy; as vain, you would have said, as a peacock, until you trod on his toes, and then you saw that he was at least clear of all the sicklier elements of vanity. Soundly rang his laugh at any jest against himself.
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