The Cords of Vanity: A Comedy of Shirking

Mr. Cabell, in making ready this second or intended edition of THE CORDS OF VANITY, performs an act of reclamation which is at the same time an act of fresh creation.

In such disconnected fashion, as hereafter, I record the moments of my life which I most vividly remember. For it is possible only in the last paragraphs of a book, and for a bo...

"That boy is dead as Schariar, Tiglath-pileser, or Clotaire, Who once of love got many a scar. And his loved lasses past compare?-- None is alive now anywhere. Each is transmute...

But at this point I raised my hand. "That is easily done, Mr. Charteris, inasmuch as the world cares nothing whatever about it. The world is composed of men and women who have t...

"Didn't I know it--didn't I know it?" I demanded of my soul, and my pulses sang a paean; "I knew, with that voice, she couldn't be a common actress--a vulgar, raddled creature o...

"That fellow who just went out," I explained--"do you know the police want his address, I think? No," I continued, after consideration, "I am sure I'm not mistaken,--that is eit...

It thus fell about that in the second European year, not very long after my mother's death, _The Apostates_ was given to the world, with what result the world has had a plenty o...

So her voice went on and on while I did not look at her. There was no passion in this voice of any kind. It was just the long monotonous wail of some hurt animal.... They were p...

But when I had come out of the Rue de la Casquette, and was approaching the statue of Gretry, I came upon a very ornately-dressed woman, who was about to enter en open carriage....

After a little, though, her gravity returned. "When I was a girl--oh, I dreamed of accomplishing all sorts of beautiful and impossible things! But, you see, there was really not...

That, though, is a business I shall not detail, because it was one of the very vulgarest sort. It was the logical outgrowth of my admiration for her yellow hair,--she did have e...

And then came the news of how the President had been shot, "with a poisoned bullet," and a week of contradictory bulletins from the Milburn House in Buffalo. And there were pani...

"Surely," said she, with sudden interest in the structure of pine-cones; "since for a long while I have wanted to know all about Jaques. You see Mr. Shakespeare is a bit hazy ab...

Madame d'Arlanges said, with a certain lack of sequence: "And yet you are planning to do precisely what Peter Blagden did. He liked Stella, she amused him, and he thought her mo...

"Mrs. Barry-Smith,"--thus I began,--"if you've the tiniest scrap of pity in your heart for a very presumptuous, blundering and unhappy person, I pray you to forgive and to forge...

"It is only rented," I submitted: "yet, after all, to boast vaingloriously of their possessions is pardonable in those who have risen in the world, and aren't quite accustomed t...

"You are painfully coarse, Peter," I pointed out, with a sigh. "Indeed, your general lack of refinement might easily lead one to think you owed your millions to your own thrifty...

By a peculiar coincidence, at twelve o'clock the following day, I happened to be sitting on the same wall at the same spot. Peter said at luncheon it was a queer thing that some...

When I had done so, Bettie shook her head. "Oh, Robin, Robin!" she said, "how did I ever come to raise a child that doesn't know his own mind for as much as two minutes? And how...

"'I thought of the dress she wore that time That we stood under the cypress-tree together, In that land, in that clime, And I turned and looked, and she was sitting there In the...

He laughed a little. "And _de te fabula_--Yet I would distinguish. You think me a futile person and not, as we will put it, a disastrously truthful person, and so on through the...