“Vanity Fair,” however, holds up the mirror to social England in the unrivalled description of Becky’s climb up the rungs of the ladder till she arrived at the very apex of fashionable success. Her husband’s position gave her every opportunity with the men, and with them it was easy enough. Where her genius was seen was in her dealings with her own sex. Apart from the skill displayed in the description of her career, she is interesting to us as an example of the gradual invasion of society by those who were born outside its pale. Men, as we have seen, like Creevey, occasionally managed to make themselves indispensable, but for a woman to do so was a most difficult task. At first Becky was a complete failure so far as her own sex was concerned. Miss Crawley was never taken in for a moment. She recognised her attractions and allowed her to amuse her, but had no idea of regarding Becky as anything more than a sort of upper servant. “She’s just a companion as you are, Briggs, only infinitely more amusing.” When she married Rawdon, she did for herself so far as the old lady’s good graces were concerned. In her early married life she was equally unsuccessful. At Paris, where her husband was in the army of occupation, her success with the men and her popularity with the great ladies of French society, owing to her mastery of the language, only increased the bitterness of her countrywomen against her. When she came back to London, men crowded her little house in Curzon Street, but the ladies held sternly aloof. Social distinctions were very marked in the early “twenties” in London, and the great ladies of the day had no idea of allowing people of doubtful birth to push themselves into their company. You doubtless recollect how Jane Austen describes the dinner party at Lady Caroline de Burgh’s in “Pride and Prejudice” to which Elizabeth and Mr. and Mrs. Collins were invited, and the studied rudeness with which her ladyship treated her guests in order to keep them conscious of their inferiority. We find the same sort of thing in Lord Lytton’s early novel “Pelham,” where the man of fashion treats the people he meets in the country as beings of a different species. Every description of fashionable life tells the same story and we have to realise this to understand “Vanity Fair.”