It is a profitable thing, if one is wise, to seem foolish.

This is my hard-earned money, and I can spend it how I see fit.

A tawdry scarf of yellow silk, trimmed with tinsel and spangles, which had seen as hard service, and boasted as honourable a transmission, was next flung over one shoulder, and fell across her person in the manner of a shoulder-belt or baldrick.

Had Edward Oxford been hanged for shooting at Queen Victoria in 1840, his death would have stirred up scores of silly shopboys to regicide (or reginicide), merely from the inscrutable passion for notoriety; for being thought about and talked about—that has much power over man’s vanity.