herself by so balancing the chances and
equalizing the distribution of good and evil in the world.
    The old haunts, the old fields and woods, the copses, ponds, and gardens,
the rooms of the old house where she had spent a couple of years seven years
ago, all carefully revisited by her. She had been young there, or comparately so
- for she forgot the time when she ever was young - but she remembered her
thoughts and feelings seven years back, and contrasted them with those which she
had at present, now that she had seen the world and lived with great people, and
raised herself far beyond her original humble station.
    »I have passed beyond it, because I have brains,« Becky thought, »and almost
all the rest of the world are fools. I could not go back, and consort with those
people now whom I used to meet in my father's studio. Lords come up to my door
with stars and garters, instead of poor artists with screws of tobacco in their
pockets. I have a gentleman for my sister, in the very house where I was little
better than a servant a few years ago. But am I much better to do now in the
world than I was when I was the poor painter's daughter, and wheedled the grocer
round the corner for sugar and tea? Suppose I had married Francis, who was so
found of me - I couldn't have been much poorer than I am now. Heigho! I wish I
could exchange my position in society, and all my relations, for a sung sum in
the Three per Cent. Consols;« for so it was that Becky felt the Vanity of human
affairs, and it was in those securities that she would have liked to cast
anchor.
    It may, perhaps, have struck her that to have been honest and humble, to
have done her duty, and to have marched straightforward on her way, would have
brought her as near happiness as that path by which she was striving to attain
it. But just as the children at Queen's Crawley went round the room where the
body of their father lay, if ever Becky had these thoughts, she was accustomed
to walk round them and not look in. She eluded them, despised them; or at least
she was committed to the other path, from which retreat was now impossible. And
for my part I believe that remorse is the least active of all a man's moral
senses - the very easiest to be deadened when wakened; and in some never,
wakened at all