“You wanted to look at life for yourself - but you were not allowed; you were punished for your wish. You were ground in the very mill of the conventional!”

“Am I grave?', he asked. 'I had an idea I was grinning from ear to ear.''You look as if you were taking me to a funeral. If that's a grin, your ears are very near together.”

“You were to suffer your fate. That was not necessarily to know it.”

“There were always people to snatch at you, and it would never occur to them that they were eating you up. They did that without tasting.”

“Night came on, the lamps were lighted, the tables near him found occupants, and Paris began to wear that peculiar evening look of hers which seems to say, in the flare of windows and theatre-doors, and the muffled rumble of swift-rolling carriages, that this is no world for you unless you have your pockets lined and your scruples drugged.”

“Whatever life you lead you must put your soul in it--to make any sort of success in it; and from the moment you do that it ceases to be romance, I assure you: it becomes grim reality! And you can't always please yourself; you must sometimes please other people. That, I admit, you're very ready to do; but there's another thing that's still more important--you must often displease others. You must always be ready for that--you must never shrink from it. That doesn't suit you at all--you're too fond of admiration, you like to be thought well of. You think we can escape disagreeable duties by taking romantic views--that's your great illusion, my dear. But we can't. You must be prepared on many occasions in life to please no one at all--not even yourself.”

“All roads lead to Rome, and there were times when it might have struck us that almost every branch of study or subject of conversation skirted forbidden ground.”