Vanity

Today, I was reading "On the Banks of Plum Creek", a Little House on the Prairie book. In the book was a chapter about a party that Mary and Laura were going to have at their house in the country. They invited a few friends, most from "town" and showed them around their humble abode.

In the process, Nellie Oleson came:

The girls came laughing and splashing through the sunny water, all except for Nellie. She had to take off her shoes and stockings and she complained that the gravel hurt her feet. She said: 'I don't go barefooted. I have shoes and stockings.'

She was wearing a new dress and big, new hair-ribbon bows.

"Is that Jack?" Christy asked, and they all patted him and said what a good dog he was. But when he politely wagged to Nellie, she said: "Go away! Don't you touch my dress!"

"Jack wouldn't touch your dress," Laura said.

They went up the path between the blowing grasses and wild flowers, to the house where Ma was waiting. Mary told her the girls' names one by one, and she smiled her lovely smile and spoke to them. But Nellie smoothed down her new party dress and said to Ma: "Of course I didn't wear my best dress to just a country party."
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The girls later had "vanity cakes" that Ma had made:

They ate and ate of those vanity cakes. They said they had never tasted anything so good, and they asked Ma what they were.

"Vanity cakes," Ma said. "Because they are all puffed up, like vanity, with nothing solid inside."
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Later on, the curriculum had a question for me to ask the kids: "Who were the vanity cakes like?" The kids answered Nellie, of course.

Nellie, for some reason, summed up her worth and other people's worth in the form of how they looked and what they owned.

Such a shame, such a shame.

Edited by the author. ;-)

~B