“I was thinking whether it would indeed have been happier for me to have died when I was a little one, before I had known anything of the world and sin.” “Oh, dear me! those are the dreadful, gloomy notions which you get from your horrid, methodistical tutor.” “Clementina, I will not hear him spoken of in that manner,” said Ernest, with a decision of tone which the young lady had never heard him make use of before. She was either offended, or thought it pretty to look so, for stopping as they reached a very low stile, she called to Charles to help her over it. She wished to vex Ernest, and raise a feeling of jealousy toward his brother; but she was successful in neither of her designs, as Ernest very contentedly turned back to Mr. Ewart, and left the fair lady to pursue her walk with the companion whom she had chosen. “I am so sorry for you, dear Charles!” said Clementina, in a voice rather more affected than usual; “it is so dreadful to be turned out of your right by a low, vulgar creature like that.” “But you see I don’t think him either low or vulgar,” replied Charles, good humouredly. “He has high feelings, and high principles; and as for being vulgar, a boy who thinks so much, and upon such subjects as he does, can never, as Mr. Ewart said to me once, have a vulgar mind.” [Illustration: RETURNING FROM CHURCH.] “I find him intolerably dull,” said Clementina. “I am sorry for it,” was her cousin’s dry reply. Clementina was now offended with Charles in his turn, and had there been a third party less unmanageable than Mr. Ewart, she would doubtless have chosen him to accompany her, in the delightful hope of annoying both her cousins. The silly girl was almost unconsciously forming a plan to separate the brothers, and make them jealous of each other, by sometimes favouring the elder, sometimes the younger, so as to draw their whole attention towards herself. You may think that it was some unkind and bitter feeling that made her wish thus to destroy their happiness and union, and act the part of a tempter towards her companions; but it was nothing but selfish vanity and folly—so that she was amused, she cared not who suffered; the power to give pain she considered as a triumph—it is reckoned so in Vanity Fair. She turned round to see if Ernest were watching her movements, but was extremely provoked to find him so deeply engaged in serious conversation with the clergyman, that her presence seemed altogether forgotten. Clementina had therefore no resource but to walk on with Charles, doing her best to put all the sermon out of his head, by rattling on about her delight at the prospect of soon going to London, her distress at its not being the gay season, her conviction that young ladies ought to come out at fourteen, how she was charmed at the prospect held out of a child’s ball in Grosvenor Square, but in despair at the dear countess not being in town! Such is the conversation of Vanity Fair.