They belonged to that vast group of human automata who go through life without neglecting to perform a single one of the gestures executed by the surrounding puppets.

And all the while, I suppose," he thought, "real people were living somewhere, and real things happening to them.

An education is like a crumbling building that needs constant upkeep with repairs and additions.

The worst of doing one's duty was that it apparently unfitted one for doing anything else.

I don't know that I should care for a man who made life easy; I should want some one who made it interesting.

The short story, free from the longuers of the novel is also exempt from the novel's conclusiveness--too often forced and false: it may thus more nearly than the novel approach aesthetic and moral truth.

As he paid the hansom and followed his wife's long train into the house he took refuge in the comforting platitude that the first six months were always the most difficult in marriage. 'After that I suppose we shall have pretty nearly finished rubbing off each other’s angles,' he reflected; but the worst of it was that May's pressure was already bearing on the very angles whose sharpness he most wanted to keep