The Way We Live Now (Centaur Classics) [The 100 greatest novels of all time - #76]

by Anthony Trollope

The man who succumbs to his wife, the mother who succumbs to her daughter, the master who succumbs to his servant, is as often brought to servility by a continual aversion to the giving of pain, by a softness which causes the fretfulness of others to be an agony to himself — as by any actual fear which the firmness of the imperious one may have produced.