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There is a surprise, too sharp a surprise, at the end of his novel, when one discovers that the moral is not "do and dare," but "all is vanity." It would have been better almost if he had been a Count de Gramont throughout, for he has a flair for the surroundings of amorous adventure and is seldom gross; better still to have seen, as Mrs. Wharton saw, the picture in perspective from the first.
Vanity allows a tender-hearted woman, who cannot see a child or a dumb brute in pain, to order the tails of her horses cut to the fashionable length and to wear upon her hat the pitiful little body of a song-bird that has been skinned alive.
If vital softness of figure is combined, with a gentle lateral rolling of the body in its gait, voluptuous character and expression of countenance are indicated. If delicacy of outline in the figure, be combined with perpendicular rising of the head, levity, perhaps vanity, is indicated. But there are innumerable combinations and modifications of the elements which we have just described.
What is peculiar to these two objects, is, that they require nothing, but what one's own vanity, interest, and pleasure, would make one do independently of them. If a man were never to be in business, and always to lead a private life, would he not desire to please and to persuade? So that, in your two destinations, your fortune and figure luckily conspire with your vanity and your pleasures.
Their golden shower being exhaled by the same vanity by which it had been shed, they as little regarded its dispersion as they had marked its descent.
The writer of Ecclesiastes tells us that he gave his heart to know madness and folly; and that it was all vanity and vexation of spirit. It will be a wise economy for us to accept his lesson without paying his tuition-fee over again. It is perfectly safe for a man to take it as a fact that fire burns, without putting his hand into the flame.
Like most women, she, too, was vain but an intelligent woman's vanity, instead of making her self-complacent, somehow spurs her on to hide her weak points and to show her best points in the best light. For example, Mrs. Burbank, a pretty woman and proud of it, was yet conscious of her deficiencies in dress and in manners through her plain and rural early surroundings.
When he had taken sufficient time to study her character, he decided that the inelegant mirth, and ungoverned vanity of Amaranthé were preferable to the dawdling insipidity of Claribel. After this decision Lionel ceased to be a visitor at the castle. The pride of Amaranthé had never before experienced so severe a wound.
The former had no liking for Rameau, who showed her none of the attentions her innocent vanity demanded, and she soon took herself off to her own room to calculate the amount of her savings, and dream of the Rue de Louvier and "golden joys."
The only instances I heard of were related to me by Swedes themselves, a large class of whom make a point of depreciating their own country and character. This habit of detraction is carried to quite as great an extreme as the vanity of the Norwegians, and is the less pardonable vice of the two.
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