Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/246

 and is indulging her vanity with the thoughts of outshining some other lady at the next ball, the tradesman who receives her money in exchange for those things which appear so trifling, to that vanity perhaps owes his own and his family's support. Here Cynthia ceased, and called on Camilla to tell what it was her mind was so earnestly fixed on. She said she did not know whether she ought not to be ashamed to own her present reflections, for she was not sure they did not arise from ill-nature; for she was thinking, in all that number of houses they passed, how many miserable creatures there were tearing one another to pieces from envy and folly; how many mothers-in-law working underhand with their husbands, to make them turn their children out of doors to beggary and misery: she could not but own the pleasing sensations she felt, for being delivered herself from those misfortunes, more than overbalanced her sorrow for her fellow-creatures; and she desired David to tell her his sentiments, whether this was not in some measure triumphing over them. I should have trembled in some companies at such a question, for fear the eagerness to decide it should prevent the hearing any one person's speaking at a time for half an hour together; but here it was otherwise; and David, after a little consideration, replied— "Nothing can be more worthy of admiration than to observe a young woman thus fearful of giving way to any frailty; but what you now express, I believe, has been felt by every mortal. To rejoice, indeed, at the sufferings of any individual, would be a sign of great malignity; or to see another in misery, and be insensible of it, would be a proof of the want of that tenderness I so much admire; but to comfort ourselves in any affliction by the consideration that it is only the common fate of men, and that we are not marked out as the peculiar