lesh the touch of the
coal from the altar should have left some visible stigmata on the lips
it has burned, as, of course anybody knows, it invariably leaves some
smirch upon the character.

Humanity feels that genius ought to wear a livery, as Jews and loose
women wore yellow in the old golden days of distinction.

"They don't even paint!" said one lady, and felt herself aggrieved.

* * *

Calumny is the homage of our contemporaries, as some South Sea Islanders
spit on those they honour.

* * *

Popularity has been defined as the privilege of being cheered by the
kind of people you would never allow to bow to you.

Fame may be said to be the privilege of being slandered at once by the
people who do bow to you, as well as by the people who do not.

* * *

Nobody there knew at all. So everybody averred they knew for certain.
Nobody's story agreed with anybody else's, but that did not matter at
all. The world, like Joseph's father, gives the favourite coat of many
colours which the brethren rend.

* * *

"Be honey, and the flies will eat you," says the old saw, but, like most
other proverbs, it will not admit of universal application. There is a
way of being honey that is thoroughly successful and extremely popular,
and constitutes a kind of armour that is bomb-proof.

* * *

The longest absence is less perilous to love than the terrible trials of
incessant proximity.

* * *

She forgot that love likes to preserve its illusions, and that it will
bear better all the sharpest deprivations in the world than it will the
cruel tests of an unlovely and unveiled intercourse.

She had committed the greatest error of all: she had let him be
disenchanted by familiarity. Passion will pardon rage, will survive
absence, will forgive infidelity, will even thrive on outrage, and will
often condone a crime; but when it dies of familiarity it is dead for
ever and aye.

* * *

Society will believe anything rather than ever believe that Itself can
be duped.

If you have only assurance enough to rely implicitly on this, there is
hardly anything you cannot induce it to accept.

* * *

Here was the secret of her success. To her nothing was little.

This temper is always popular with Society. To enjoy yourself in the
world, is, to the world, the prettiest of indirec