Here's a rather long quote from Josephine Tey (the speaker is Grant in The Singing Sands)



"It's a harmless sort of weakness," Tad said, with a tolerant lift of a shoulder.



"That is just where you are wrong. It is the utterly destructive quality. When you say vanity, you are thinking of the kind that admires itself in the mirror and buys things to deck itself out in. But that is merely personal conceit. Real vanity is something quite different. A matter not of person but of… Continue