[Sidenote:  The Bitter Proof]

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.”  So spake the prophet in Jerusalem and the centuries have brought the bitter proof.  Vanity has reared palaces which have vanished like the architecture of a mirage.  Vanity has led the hosts against itself.

Where are Babylon and Nineveh; the hanging gardens and the splendour of forgotten kings?  Where are Caesar and Cleopatra; Trianon and Marie Antoinette?  Where is the lordly Empire of France?  Is it buried with military honours, in the grave of the exiled Napoleon?

Vanity’s pomp endureth for a day, but Vanity itself is perennial.  Vanity sets whole races of men in motion, pitting them against each other across intervening seas.

One woman has a stone, no larger than a pea, brought from a mine in South Africa.  Vanity sets it proudly upon her breast and leads other women to envy her its possession, for purely selfish reasons.  One woman’s gown is made from a plant which grows in Georgia and she is unhappy because it is not the product of a French or Japanese worm.

One woman’s coat is woven from the covering of a sheep, and she is not content because it has not cost a greater number of silver pieces and more bits of green paper, besides the life of an Arctic seal, that never harmed her nor hers.

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.

Vanity permits a woman to trim the outer garments of the little stranger for whose coming she has long waited and prayed, with pretty, fluffy fur torn from the unborn baby of another mother—­who is only a sheep.  Vanity permits a woman to insist that her combs and pins shall be real tortoise-shell, which is obtained from the quivering animal by roasting it alive before a slow fire.

[Sidenote:  All is Vanity]

“Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!” The mad race still goes on.  It is insatiate vanity which wrecks lives, ruins homes, torments one’s fellows, and blinds the clear vision of its victims.  It harms others, but most of all one’s self.

[Sidenote:  The Conqueror]

There is only one place from which it is shut out—­from the union with that other soul.  Great as it is, there is still a greater force; there is the inevitable conqueror, for Vanity cannot exist side by side with Love.

Widowers and Widows

[Illustration]

Widowers and Widows

Next to burglars, mice, and green worms, every normal girl fears a widow.  Courtships have been upset and expected proposals have vanished into thin air, simply because a widow has come into the game.  There is only one thing to do in such a case; retreat gracefully, and leave the field to her.