The Moonstone

by Wilkie Collins

How it was I don’t understand, but we always seemed to be getting, with the best of motives, in one another’s way. When I wanted to go up-stairs, there was my wife coming down; or when my wife wanted to go

down, there was I coming up. That is married life, according to my experience of it.

It is one of my rules in life, never to notice what I don’t understand. I steered a middle course between the Objective side and the Subjective side.15 In plain English I stared hard, and said nothing.

You dabbled in nasty mud, and made pies, when you were a child; and you dabble in nasty science, and dissect spiders, and spoil flowers, when you grow up.

But compare the hardest day’s work you ever did with the idleness that splits flowers and pokes its way into spiders’ stomachs, and thank your stars that your head has got something it must think of, and your hands something that they must do.

Study your wife closely, for the next four-and-twenty hours. If your good lady doesn’t exhibit something in the shape of a contradiction in that time, Heaven help you!—you have married a monster.

If you are not, skip this bit, and thank God you have got something in the way of a defence between your hair-brush and your head.

Every human institution (Justice included) will stretch a little, if you only pull it the right way. The worthy

The other women took to their Bibles and hymn-books, and looked as sour as verjuice27 over their reading—a result, which I have observed, in my sphere of life, to follow generally on the performance of acts of piety at unaccustomed periods of the day.

I am (thank God!) constitutionally superior to reason.

Cultivate a superiority to reason, and see how you pare the claws of all

the sensible people when they try to scratch you for your own good!

I paid the cabman exactly his fare. He received it with an oath; upon which I instantly gave him a tract. If I had presented a pistol

at his head, this abandoned wretch could hardly have exhibited greater consternation. He jumped up on his box, and, with profane exclamations of dismay, drove off furiously.

Quite useless, I am happy to say! I sowed the good seed, in spite of him, by throwing a second tract...

That,” added Aunt Ablewhite, pointing out of window to an invalid going by in a chair on wheels, drawn by a man, “is my idea of exercise. If it’s air you want, you get it in your chair. And if it’s fatigue you want, I am sure it’s fatiguing enough to look at the man.”

I am not ignorant that old Mr. Ablewhite has the reputation generally (especially among his inferiors) of being a remarkably good-natured man. According to my observation of him, he deserves his reputation as long as he has his own way, and not a moment longer.