Friday, January 13, 2012

Commonplace Book

'...I have come to the conclusion that the heaviest load under which man groans is poverty. By poverty I do not mean comfortable, decent poverty, which pays ready money, which keeps a parlour-maid instead of butler and footman, which walks instead of drives, buys cotton gowns instead of silk dresses for its wife, which sends its sons to Cheltenham and Cambridge, instead of Eton and Christ Church; but the bugbear I have before me is poverty such as ours was - the poverty of living in a wide house - not with a brawling woman - but worse, with a very narrow income; the poverty which dares not look on from month to month and from day to day, before whose inner eyes bum-bailiffs are ever present; the poverty which steals away our cheerful spirits; which renders us envious, and spiteful, and sordid, which makes our days a long torture, and our nights a long vigil; which saps the springs of our life, and sometimes ends by making us cut our throats to escape it!..'

from Cometh Up as a Flower by Rhoda Broughton (Chapter VI)

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