The Way We Live Now

by Anthony Trollope

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.