"William Makepeace Thackeray. Vanity fair" - читать интересную книгу автора

trooping to watering-places? What keeps them dancing
till five o'clock in the morning through a whole mortal
season? What causes them to labour at pianoforte sonatas,
and to learn four songs from a fashionable master at a
guinea a lesson, and to play the harp if they have
handsome arms and neat elbows, and to wear Lincoln
Green toxophilite hats and feathers, but that they may bring
down some "desirable" young man with those killing bows
and arrows of theirs? What causes respectable parents
to take up their carpets, set their houses topsy-turvy, and
spend a fifth of their year's income in ball suppers and
iced champagne? Is it sheer love of their species, and
an unadulterated wish to see young people happy and
dancing? Psha! they want to marry their daughters; and,
as honest Mrs. Sedley has, in the depths of her kind
heart, already arranged a score of little schemes for the
settlement of her Amelia, so also had our beloved but
unprotected Rebecca determined to do her very best to
secure the husband, who was even more necessary for
her than for her friend. She had a vivid imagination; she
had, besides, read the Arabian Nights and Guthrie's
Geography; and it is a fact that while she was dressing for
dinner, and after she had asked Amelia whether her
brother was very rich, she had built for herself a most
magnificent castle in the air, of which she was mistress,
with a husband somewhere in the background (she had
not seen him as yet, and his figure would not therefore
be very distinct); she had arrayed herself in an infinity
of shawls, turbans, and diamond necklaces, and had
mounted upon an elephant to the sound of the march in
Bluebeard, in order to pay a visit of ceremony to the
Grand Mogul. Charming Alnaschar visions! it is the
happy privilege of youth to construct you, and many
a fanciful young creature besides Rebecca Sharp has
indulged in these delightful day-dreams ere now!

Joseph Sedley was twelve years older than his sister
Amelia. He was in the East India Company's Civil
Service, and his name appeared, at the period of which
we write, in the Bengal division of the East India Register,
as collector of Boggley Wollah, an honourable and
lucrative post, as everybody knows: in order to know
to what higher posts Joseph rose in the service, the
reader is referred to the same periodical.

Boggley Wollah is situated in a fine, lonely, marshy,
jungly district, famous for snipe-shooting, and where
not unfrequently you may flush a tiger. Ramgunge, where
there is a magistrate, is only forty miles off, and there
is a cavalry station about thirty miles farther; so Joseph