George came in and looked at her again, entering still more softly.  By the pale night-lamp he could see her sweet, pale face—­the purple eyelids were fringed and closed, and one round arm, smooth and white, lay outside of the coverlet.  Good God! how pure she was; how gentle, how tender, and how friendless! and he, how selfish, brutal, and black with crime!  Heart-stained and shame-stricken, he stood at the bed’s foot, and looked at the sleeping girl.  How dared he—­who was he, to pray for one so spotless!  God bless her!  God bless her!  He came to the bed-side, and looked at the hand, the little soft hand, lying asleep; and he bent over the pillow noiselessly towards the gentle pale face.

The whole tragedy of their lives is given in miniature in this touching scene; and yet how natural and commonplace are all the effects of which it is composed, how few and simple the words which describe such love and such remorse.  It is hard to judge in Vanity Fair which are the more perfect in style, the pathetic and tragic scenes or those which are charged with humour and epigram.

And the scene after George’s marriage, when old Osborne burns his will and erases his son’s name from the family Bible—­and the scene when Osborne receives his son’s last letter—­“Osborne trembled long before the letter from his dead son”—­“His father could not see the kiss George had placed on the superscription of his letter.  Mr. Osborne dropped it with the bitterest, deadliest pang of balked affection and revenge.  His son was still beloved and unforgiven.”  And the scene of “the widow and mother,” when young Georgy is born, and the wonderful scene when Sir Pitt proposes marriage to the little green-eyed governess and she is scared into confessing her great secret, and the most famous scene of all, when Rawdon Crawley is released from the sponging-house and finds Lord Steyne with Rebecca alone.  It is but a single page.  The words spoken are short, brief, plain—­not five sentences pass—­“I am innocent,” said she—­“Make way, let me pass,” cried My Lord—­“You lie, you coward and villain!” said Rawdon.  There is in all fiction no single scene more vivid, more true, more burnt into the memory, more tragic.  And with what noble simplicity, with what incisive reticence, with what subtle anatomy of the human heart, is it recorded.

Vanity Fair was written, it is true, under the strain of serial publication, haste, and anxiety, but it is perhaps, even in style, the most truly complete.  The wonderful variety, elasticity, and freshness of the dialogue, the wit of the common scenes, the terrible power of the tragic scenes, the perfection of the mise-en-scene—­the rattle, the fun, the glitter of the Fair, are sustained from end to end, from the first words of the ineffable Miss Pinkerton to the Vanitas Vanitatum when the showman shuts up his puppets in their box.  There is not in all Vanity Fair a single dull