The House of Mirth

by Edith Wharton

But we’re so different, you know: she likes being good, and I like being happy.

“Your coat’s a little shabby—but who cares? It doesn’t keep people from asking you to dine. If I were shabby no one would have me: a woman is asked out as much for her clothes as for herself.

Most timidities have such secret compensations, and Miss Bart was discerning enough to know that the inner vanity is generally in proportion to the outer self-depreciation.

She had been long enough in bondage to other people’s pleasure to be considerate of those who depended on hers, and in her bitter moods it sometimes struck her that she and her maid were in the same position, except that the latter received her wages more regularly.

She had hated dinginess, and it was her fate to be dingy.

Misfortune had made Lily supple instead of hardening her, and a pliable substance is less easy to break than a stiff one.

Under the glitter of their opportunities she saw the poverty of their achievement.

Was it love, she wondered, or a mere fortuitous combination of happy thoughts and sensations?

Where duty and inclination jumped together, it was not in Lily’s nature to hold them asunder.

“My idea of success,” he said, “is personal freedom.” “Freedom? Freedom from worries?” “From everything—from money, from poverty, from ease and anxiety, from all the material accidents. To keep a kind of republic of the spirit—that’s what I call success.”

one of the conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money, and the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it.”

“Why do we call all our generous ideas illusions, and the mean ones truths?

“Isn’t it natural that I should try to belittle all the things I can’t offer you?”

She did not wish to see him again, not because she feared his influence, but because his presence always had the effect of cheapening her aspirations, of throwing her whole world out of focus.

What if she made him marry her for love, now that he had no other reason for marrying her?

One of the surprises of her unoccupied state was the discovery that time, when it is left to itself and no definite demands are made on it, cannot be trusted to move at any recognized pace. Usually it loiters; but just when one has come to count upon its slowness, it may suddenly break into a wild irrational gallop.

Poverty simplifies book-keeping,