will be sure to be
some old bent woman praying.

* * *

The moths will eat all that fine delicate feeling away, little by
little; the moths of the world will eat the unselfishness first, and
then the innocence, and then the honesty, and then the decency; no one
will see them eating, no one will see the havoc being wrought, but
little by little the fine fabric will go, and in its place will be dust.
Ah, the pity of it! The pity of it! The webs come out of the great
weaver's loom lovely enough, but the moths of the world eat them all.

* * *

She had five hundred dear friends, but this one she was really fond of;
that is to say, she never said anything bad of her, and only laughed at
her good-naturedly when she had left a room; and this abstinence is as
strong a mark of sincerity now-a-days as dying for another used to be in
the old days of strong feeling and the foolish expression of them.

* * *

Gratitude is such an unpleasant quality, you know; there is always a
grudge behind it!

* * *

The richest soil always bears the rankest mushrooms: France is always
bearing mushrooms.

* * *

Position, she thought, was the only thing that, like old wine or oak
furniture, improved with years.

* * *

Position is a pillory: sometimes they pelt one with rose-leaves, and
sometimes with rotten eggs, but one is for ever in the pillory!

* * *

We are too afraid of death: that fear is the shame of Christianity.

* * *

He never could prevail on his vanity to break with her, lest men should
think she had broken with him.

* * *

She would go grandly to the guillotine, but she will never understand
her own times. She has dignity; we have not a scrap; we have forgotten
what it was like; we go into a passion at the amount of our bills; we
play and never pay; we smoke and we wrangle; we laugh loud, much too
loud; we inspire nothing unless, now and then, a bad war or a disastrous
speculation; we live showily, noisily, meanly, gaudily.

* * *

Big brains do not easily hold trifles ... little packets of starch that
this world thinks are the staff of life.

* * *

Pehl, like a young girl, is prettiest in the morning. Pehl is calm and
sedate, and simple and decorous. Pehl is like some tender, fair,
wholesome