A lot of people might have thought that such a lack of vanity was beyond Victoria Beckham, the famously serious, grumpy wife of the much more jovial David.
It was a virtual admission that the enormous cost was not money for the railways as such, but little more than a vanity project.
This might be the stuff of your basic vanity label — a homegrown operation created to issue the owners' music — except that Mr. Parker and Ms. Pallatto, both 56, have such a peculiar take on vanity.
Such vanity is a particularly heavy burden for a flashy plutocrat to carry in monochromatically liberal Manhattan.
Tom Wolfe said Burton B. Roberts, the model for a cranky character in Mr. Wolfe's 1987 best-seller "The Bonfire of the Vanities," "had such a huge impact on my life, it's hard to know where to start".
No doubt his vanity would relish such a triumph, but the futile peace talks to date have required almost infinite amounts of patience and persistence.
Their vanity contents itself with such a small amount of grandeur.
As Ms. Kane writes, "Puritans strove to keep human frailties, such as vanity and pride, in check, and this is reflected in the modest emblems of ownership on objects they possessed".
