The Way We Live Now

by Anthony Trollope

The facts, if not true, were well invented; the arguments, if not logical, were seductive.

acquired the knack of spreading all she knew very thin, so that it might cover a vast surface.

Her happiness, like that of most of us, was ever in the future – never reached but always coming.

In utrumque paratus,1 the

She was herself not very highly born, not very highly gifted, not very lovely, not very pleasant, and she had no fortune.

She dispensed champagne and smiles, and made everybody, including herself, believe that she was in love with her husband.

What nuisance can be so great to a man busied with immense affairs, as to have to explain – or to attempt to explain – small details to men incapable of understanding them?

The natural liking of a young woman for a man in a station above her, because he is softer and cleaner and has better parts of speech – just as we keep a pretty dog if we keep a dog at all – is one of the evils of the inequality of mankind. The girl is content with the love without having the love justified, because the object is more desirable. She can only have her love justified with an object less desirable. If all men wore coats of the same fabric, and had to share the soil of the work of the world equally between them, that evil would come to an end. A woman here and there might go wrong from fantasy and diseased passions, but the ever-existing temptation to go wrong would be at an end.’ ‘If men were equal to-morrow and all wore the same coats, they would wear different coats the next day.’ ‘Slightly different But there would be no more purple and fine linen, and no more blue woad. It isn’t to be done in a day, of course, nor yet in a century – nor in a decade of centuries; but every human being who looks into it honestly will see that his efforts should be made in that direction.

Rank squanders money; trade makes it – and then trade purchases rank by re-gilding its splendour.

Throughout the world, the more wrong a man does, the more indignant is he at wrong done to him.

The loss of fifty pounds or of a few hundreds may create personal wrath – but fifty thousand require equanimity.

As to giving his coat to the thief who had taken his cloak – he told himself that were he and others to be guided by that precept honest industry would go naked in order that vice and idleness might be comfortably clothed.