olds. We never let Harry rest until he had asked Hetty in
marriage. He obeyed, and it was she who declined. "She had always," she
wrote, "the truest regard for him from the dear old time when they had
met almost children together. But she would never leave her father. When
it pleased God to take him, she hoped she would be too old to think of
bearing any other name but her own."

My brother Hal is still a young man, being little more than 50, and
Hetty is now a staid little lady. There are days when she looks
surprisingly young and blooming. Why should Theo and I have been so
happy, and thou so lonely?

* * * * *

Vanity Fair

"Vanity Fair" was published in 1848, and at once placed its
author in the front rank of novelists. It was followed by
"Pendennis" in 1850, "Esmond" in 1852, "The Newcomes" in 1855,
and "The Virginians" in 1859. Some critics profess to see
manifested in "Vanity Fair" a certain sharpness and sarcasm in
Thackeray's character which does not appear in his later
works, but however much the author may have mellowed in his
later novels, "Vanity Fair" continues to be his acknowledged
masterpiece, and of all the characters he drew, Becky Sharp is
the best known.

_I.--Miss Sharp Opens Her Campaign_

One sunshiny morning in June there drove up to the great iron gate of
Miss Pinkerton's academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large
family coach with two fat horses in blazing harness.

"It is Mrs. Sedley's coach, sister," said Miss Jemima. The day of
departure had come, and Miss Amelia Sedley, an amiable young lady, was
glad to go home, and yet woefully sad at leaving school. Miss Rebecca
Sharp, whose father had been an artist, accompanied Amelia, to pass a
week with her friend in Russell Square before she entered upon her
duties as governess in Sir Pitt Crawley's family.

Thus the world began for these two young ladies. For Amelia it was quite
a new, fresh, brilliant world, with all the bloom upon it. It was not
quite a new one for Rebecca, who, before she came to the Mall, as a
governess-pupil, had turned many a dun away from her father's door. She
had never been a girl, she said: she had been a woman since she was
eight years old.

At Russell Square Rebecca saw the two magnificent Cashmere shawls which
Joseph Sedley of the East India Company's Civil Service had brought home
to his sister, said with