All the advantages were with Gay—money, position, freedom—there was even her great capacity for winning hearts to set against her cousin's beauty; it wasn't fair, and the unfairest thing of all was Carlton Mackrell's obvious devotion, and as Lossie sat unnoticed, while Gay was the magnet that drew the eyes and hearts of both men present, perhaps the two smartest and best-looking men of their circle, and one of whom Lossie loved, her gorge rose.
Fortunately Gay was not in love with him, and up to now, at any rate, Carlton had not picked a quarrel with Lossie for loving him unbidden, as some men do (regarding it as an unwarrantable encroachment on their liberty), and when Gay married Chris, whom she loved without knowing it, then Lossie would cut in, and a beautiful woman at close quarters is a beautiful woman all the world over.
Failing him, but the girl shuddered at the thought, there was the Professor ... rich men did not grow on every bush, and her tastes were expensive.
The mother of Frank and Gay had been wealthy, and their father and his family comparatively poor, a fact greatly resented by Lossie, who had a mordant tongue, and was wont to describe the Lawless branch of the family as "the silk cloak," and hers as "the cotton lining."
It was with angry, embittered heart that later in the afternoon she turned her steps homewards, bitterly comparing her lot with Gay's, for Becky Sharp's type is much commoner than is generally supposed—the type that can be good and happy (at a pinch) on five thousand a year, but quite good, and quite happy on ten and upwards, and Lossie was of that type.
She had friends, of course, and admirers, who came to see her, George Conant much oftener than she wanted him, but a house without plenty of money, and a man at the head of it, is not half equipped for life and happiness. For the tiny establishment in South Street was run, if not ruled, by Aunt Lavinia (Chris's especial pal), who would greatly have preferred the more roomy comfort of Connaught Square, in which the Professor and Gay buried their unfashionable heads.
Both Lossie's parents were dead, and Lavinia had given her sister's child a home, tackling each day the difficult problem of trying to love a singularly unloveable girl, though "Anyway, my dear, she's delightful to look at!" Lavinia would say confidentially to Gay, after some especially flagrant piece of selfishness on Lossie's part.
Lavinia had a queer religion of her own (but not so queer when you come to reflect that nowadays real religion is found chiefly in those who do not profess any), and it was summed up in the love of humanity, and the law of human kindness.
"Teach folks to love," she used to say; "teach 'em to keep on loving—the rest will follow. No soul was ever yet damned that knew how to love—it's in the loving, not the being loved, that we find happiness. Have you ever noticed the courting couples about on Sundays and holidays, that if the girls are not pretty, they look so? Love has done the trick—not new clothes, or getting themselves up, but just loving something that's not themselves."
Lossie had an immense contempt for the "giving out" process of love as practised by Aunt Lavinia, the more especially when it took the form of cheques better employed in paying the milliners' bills of her niece, nor was the Professor more appreciative, for he seldom or never went to see his father's sister in South Street, though he welcomed her cordially enough on her rare visits to Connaught Square. Perhaps it was because (as he had long ago suspected) she reluctantly recognised him as lazy, self-indulgent, ruined by his too abundant means, amiable with the tepid amiability of a dog who does not fight, and by blandishments hopes to be allowed to retain his bone. Hall-marked he was, with the special form of selfishness that makes the man completely happy in his bodily environment, and mental pursuits and hobbies, shun the society of his kind, and to whom it is a matter of complete indifference that "grass-grown become the paths to friendship that are never trod."