and attractions of that useful article of furniture--the sublime,
immortal prig of all the ages, or you can take the head of any novel-
reader under thirty for a football. You may have known many women, from
Bernadettes of Massavielle to Borgias of scant neighborhoods, but you
know you never knew one who would marry Old Dob, except as that
emotional dishrag, Amelia, married him--as the Last Chance on the
stretching high-road of uncertain years. No girl ever willingly marries
door mats. She just wipes her feet on them and passes on into the
drawing room looking for the Prince. It seems to me one of the
triumphant proofs of Becky as a heroine that she did not marry Captain
Dobbin. She might have done it any day by crooking her little finger at
him--but she didn't.

Madame Becky, that smart daughter of an alcoholic gentleman artist
and of his lady of the French ballet, inherited the perfect non-moral
morality of the artist blood that sang mercurially through her veins.
How could she, therefore, how could she, being non-moral, be immoral? It
is clear nonsense. But she did possess the instinctive artist
morality of unerring taste for selection in choice. Examine the facts
meticulously--meticulously--and observe how carefully she selected that
best in all that worst she moved among.

In the will I shall some day leave behind me there will be devised, in
primogenitural trust forever, the priceless treasure of conviction that
Becky was innocent of Lord Steyne. I leave it to any gentleman who has
had the great opportunity to look in familiarly upon the outer and upper
fringes of the world of unclassed and predatory women and the noble
lords that abound thereamong. Let him read over again that famous scene
where Becky writes her scorn upon Steyne's forehead in the noble blood
of that aristocratic wolf. Then let him give his decision, as an honest