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Her grief was too strong and too true to require any pretence of being unable to fulfil trivial tasks, nor would she have understood that any one could so pretend. Vanity is a sentiment so entirely at variance with genuine grief, yet a sentiment so inherent in human nature, that even the most poignant sorrow does not always drive it wholly forth.
She welcomed Voltaire because he flattered her vanity and amused her guests, but she was far enough from the theories which were slowly fanning the sparks of the Revolution. Her rather imperious patronage of literary and scientific men set a fashion which all her world tried to follow.
But the events of this day, added to the late insolent conduct of her sisters, which provoked the reprimand of her peevish mother guardian, who told her to curb her "Irish temper," these cleared up all her doubts; and, filled with a melancholy joy at a revelation she owed to the jealousy and vanity of a proud mother and her daughters, Alia retired to her room to give vent to her feelings in sobs and tears.
She was gaining flesh and color every day, but the slender throat and wrists and transparent hands were a bitter reproach to Grif even then, and it would be many weeks before she could again indulge in that old harmless vanity in her dimples and smooth roundness of form.
I cannot suppose, situated as I was at Lady Dundas's, surrounded by frivolous and contemptible society, that he could discover anything in me to warrant such a vanity. Every way embarrassed as I was, disliking my companions, afraid of my own interest in him, a veil was drawn over my mind, through which he could neither judge of my good nor bad qualities.
Still, we know our own callings, and they are what I consider natural callings, and are not parvarted by vanity and wantonness. Now, my gifts are with the rifle, and on a trail, and in the way of game and scouting; for, though I can use the spear and the paddle, I pride not myself on either.
I once had the pleasure to see him bargaining with a miser for his soul, which, after much ingenious skirmishing on both sides, his highness succeeded in obtaining at about the value of sixpence. The prince remarked with a smile, that he was a loser by the transaction. Day after day, as I walked the streets of Vanity, my manners and deportment became more and more like those of the inhabitants.
That little band of orphaned children intensified my feeling of sorrow and added to the disenchantment of the May night, and I had a consciousness of the vanity of prayer, of the emptiness of all things. In the Marine Garden my sadness increased. It was extremely cold, and we shivered in our light spring wraps. There was not a single promenader to be seen.
Grushnitski stood before me in violent agitation, his eyes cast down. But the struggle between his conscience and his vanity was of short duration. The captain of dragoons, who was sitting beside him, nudged him with his elbow.
"Yet, for all that," said the princess, "I could wish my picture were in the hands of this same stranger." "Oh, madam," answered Abricotina, "is not his desire to see you violent enough already? Would you augment it?" "Yes," cried the princess; "a certain impulse of vanity, which I was never sensible of till now, has bred this foolish fancy in me."
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