[Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray]@TWC D-Link book
Vanity Fair

CHAPTER XIX
7/20

Reminiscences of the most becoming dresses and brilliant ball triumphs will go very little way to console faded beauties.

Perhaps statesmen, at a particular period of existence, are not much gratified at thinking over the most triumphant divisions; 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.
"If that poor man of mine had a head on his shoulders," Mrs.Bute Crawley thought to herself, "how useful he might be, under present circumstances, to this unhappy old lady! He might make her repent of her shocking free-thinking ways; he might urge her to do her duty, and cast off that odious reprobate who has disgraced himself and his family; and he might induce her to do justice to my dear girls and the two boys, who require and deserve, I am sure, every assistance which their relatives can give them." And, as the hatred of vice is always a progress towards virtue, Mrs.
Bute Crawley endeavoured to instil her sister-in-law a proper abhorrence for all Rawdon Crawley's manifold sins: of which his uncle's wife brought forward such a catalogue as indeed would have served to condemn a whole regiment of young officers.

If a man has committed wrong in life, I don't know any moralist more anxious to point his errors out to the world than his own relations; so Mrs.Bute showed a perfect family interest and knowledge of Rawdon's history.

She had all the particulars of that ugly quarrel with Captain Marker, in which Rawdon, wrong from the beginning, ended in shooting the Captain.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books