The Nebuly Coat quotes

There came into his head an old architectural saw, “The arch never sleeps”; and as he looked up at the four wide and finely-drawn semicircles they seemed to say:

“The arch never sleeps, never sleeps. They have bound on us a burden too heavy to be borne. We are shifting it. The arch never sleeps.”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” the Rector still murmured. “Daring fellows, these Norman builders.”

Oh,” he cried, “it’s too bad! The naturals are worn down to the quick, you can see the wood in the gutters of the keys, and the pedal-board’s too short and all to pieces.

Ah well! the organ’s like me⁠—old, neglected, worn-out. I wish I was dead.

” He had been talking half to himself, but he turned to Westray and said: “Forgive me for being peevish;

Anastasia Joliffe thought, as she left the room, that there were fewer wrinkles and a sweeter look than usual in the old face, and wondered that her aunt had never married.

Youth looking at an old maid traces spinsterhood to man’s neglect.

It is so hard to read in sixty’s plainness the beauty of sixteen—to think that underneath the placidity of advancing years may lie buried, yet unforgotten, the memory of suits urged ardently, and quenched long ago in tears.

I hate to see those horrid glasses taken in after your supper. It used to be so different, and I loved to hear the Pastoral and Les Adieux going when the house was still.”

It is sad when man’s unhappiness veils from him the smiling face of nature.

The promise of the early morning was maintained. The sky was of a translucent blue, broken with islands and continents of clouds, dazzling white like cotton-wool.

she makes a way of escape for her own, and speaks of dear Dick and dear Tom for all the world as if they had been double Baxter-saints. No, blood is thicker than water; damnation doesn’t hold good for her own.

Love is stronger than hellfire, and works a miracle for Dick and Tom; only she has to make up the balance by giving other folks an extra dose of brimstone.

“Lastly, worldly wisdom, or what Miss Joliffe thinks wisdom, says, ‘No, don’t sell it; you should get more than fifty pounds for such a gem.’

“No, I am afraid I have not,” he said; “you see, I never take spirits myself. Will you not join me in a cup of cocoa? The kettle boils.”

“You ought to have been an old woman,” he said; “only old women drink cocoa. Well, I don’t mind if I do; any port in a storm.”

The organist went to bed that night in a state of exemplary sobriety, for when he got down to his own room he could find no spirit in the cupboard, and remembered that he had finished the last bottle of old Martelet’s eau-de-vie at his …

The stranger was amused at the old man’s officiousness.

“I am in,” he whispered back, “and, being in, will take a seat, if you please, until the service is over.”

The clerk looked at him doubtfully for a moment, but if there was amusement to be read in the other’s countenance, there was also a decision that did not encourage opposition.

“Come, come!” he said, touching the intruder on the shoulder; “you cannot sit here; these are the Fording seats, and kep’ for Lord Blandamer’s family.”

“I will make room if Lord Blandamer brings his family,” the stranger said; and, seeing that the old man was returning to the attack, added, “Hush! that is enough.”

The clerk looked at him again, and then turned back to his own place, routed.

If the Dorcas Society was a duty for the little old lady, it was also a pleasure—one of her few pleasures, and perhaps the greatest. She liked the meetings, because on such occasions she felt herself to be the equal of her more prosperous neighbours.

It is the same feeling that makes the half-witted attend funerals and church services.

At such times they feel themselves to be for once on an equal footing with their fellow-men: all are reduced to the same level;

“Do,” said Lord Blandamer, “and send me a copy.

This place ought to have its poet, and it is much safer to write verses to arches than to arched eyebrows.

”

Sharnall knew how to prepare? Could it be that the Bishop had some idea of making Mr. Sharnall organist in his private chapel, for there was no vacancy in the Cathedral?

Conjecture charged the blank wall of mystery full tilt, and retired broken from the assault.

After talking of nothing else for many hours, Mrs. Parkyn declared that the matter had no interest at all for her.

To change a habit at fifty-five or forty-five or thirty-five; to ordain that rivers shall flow uphill; to divert the relentless sequence of cause and effect—how often dare we say this happens?

Nemo repente⁠—no man ever suddenly became good.

A moment’s spiritual agony may blunt our instincts and paralyse the evil in us—for a while, even as chloroform may dull our bodily sense; but for permanence there is no sudden turning of the mind; sudden repentances in life or death are equally impossible.

saying to you that seed time is more profitable than harvest, and the wandering years than the practice of the master.

Refrain from too much pity, and believe that loneliness is not always lonely.

Westray was of a gregarious temperament, and missed his fellow-lodger. The cranky little man, with all his soured outlook, must still have had some power of evoking sympathy, some attractive element in his composition.

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a hell of heaven, a heaven of hell.”

Of all earthly consolations this is the greatest, that the mind is its own place.

The mind is an impregnable fortress which can be held against all comers, the mind is a sanctuary open day or night to the pursued, the mind is a flowery pleasance where shade refreshes even in summer droughts.

Westray was to shield her? She asked herself the question formally, though she knew the answer all the while. Her own heart had told her enough of late, to remove all difficulty in reading between Mr. Westray’s lines.

A jealous man is, if possible, more contemptible than a jealous woman.

Man’s greater strength postulates a broader mind and wider outlook; and if he fail in these, his failure is more conspicuous than woman’s. Anastasia had traced to jealousy the origin of Westray’s enigmatic remarks;

In her inmost heart, however, she doubted whether she would be really justified in devoting herself to teaching; for she was conscious that she might be called to fill a higher mission, and to instruct by the pen rather than by word of mouth.

As every soldier carries in his knapsack the baton of the Field Marshal, so every girl in her teens knows that there lie hidden in the recesses of her armoire, the robes and coronet and full insignia of a first-rate novelist.

She may not choose to take them out and air them, the crown may tarnish by disuse, the moth of indolence may corrupt, but there lies the panoply in which she may on any day appear fully dight, for the astonishment of an awakening world.

3 ditto, silk, 1 shilling.” Yes, she was indeed a guilty woman. It was she that had “run up” these accounts, and she grew red to think that her own hand should have helped to build so dismal a pile.

Debt, like every other habit that runs counter to the common good, brings with it its own punishment, because society protects itself by making unpleasant the ways of such as inconvenience their neighbours.

It is true that some are born with a special talent and capacity for debt—they live on it, and live merrily withal, but most debtors feel the weight of their chains, and suffer greater pangs than those which they inflict on any defrauded creditor.

It is true that some are born with a special talent and capacity for debt—they live on it, and live merrily withal, but most debtors feel the weight of their chains, and suffer greater pangs than those which they inflict on any defrauded creditor.

If the millstone grinds slowly it grinds small, and undischarged accounts bring more pain than the goods to which they relate ever brought pleasure.

Among such bitternesses surely most bitter are the bills for things of which the fruition has ceased—for worn-out finery, for withered flowers, for drunk wine.

Mr. Sharnall was used to call him a hypocrite, but the aspersion was false, as such an aspersion commonly is.

Hypocrites, in the pure and undiluted sense, rarely exist outside the pages of fiction.

Except in the lower classes, where deceit thrives under the incentive of clerical patronage, men seldom assume deliberately the garb of religion to obtain temporal advantages or to further their own ends.

If he is froward with the froward, so he is just with the just, and the more sympathetic and susceptible his nature, the more amenable is he to temporary influences.

It is this chameleon adaptability that passes for hypocrisy.

Cousin Joliffe was no hypocrite, he acted up to his light; and even if the light be a badly-trimmed, greasy, evil-smelling paraffin-lamp, the man who acts up to it is only the more to be pitied.

“Forgive me if I go direct to business. I am a business man and a plain man, and like plain speaking.”

It is wonderful to what rude remarks, and unkind remarks and untrue remarks such words as these commonly form the prelude, and how very few of these plain speakers enjoy being plainly spoken to in turn.

“We were talking just now,” he went on, “of the duty of walking circumspectly, but it is our duty, Miss Joliffe, to see that those over whom we are set in authority walk circumspectly as well.

But no fierce passage of arms followed; there was a pause, and if a dignified ending were desired the interview should here have ended.

But to ordinary mortals the sound of their own voices is so musical as to deaden any sense of anticlimax; talking is continued for talking’s sake, and heroics tail off into desultory conversation.

Both sides were conscious that they had overstated their sentiments, and were content to leave main issues undecided.

The recurrence of a weekly pleasure, which seems so limitless in youth and middle age, becomes less inexhaustible as life turns towards sunset.

Thirty takes lightly enough the foregoing of a Saturday reunion, the uncongenial spending of a Sunday; but seventy can see the end of the series, and grudges every unit of the total that remains.

For three Saturdays Miss Joliffe watched, and for three Saturdays no suspicious visitor appeared.

Miss Joliffe had rung and received no answer, had discovered that the front-door was unlocked, and had at last found Anastasia sitting forlorn in Mr. Westray’s room with the window open. A chill was indicated, and Miss Joliffe put her to bed at once.

Bed is a first aid that even ambulance classes have not entirely taught us to dispense with; it is, moreover, a poor man’s remedy, being exceedingly cheap, if, indeed, the poor man is rich enough to have a bed at all.

Had Anastasia been Miss Bulteel, or even Mrs. Parkyn, or lying and mischief-making Mrs. Flint, Dr. Ennefer would have been summoned forthwith;

But it was her conscience that demanded the sacrifice, and she took the more pleasure in making it, because she felt at heart that the pound of flesh might never really after all be cut.

How thoroughly do we enjoy these sacrifices to conscience, these followings of honour’s code severe, when we know that none will be mean enough to take us at our word!

To what easily-gained heights of morality does it raise us to protest that we never could accept the gift that will eventually be forced into our reluctant hands, to insist that we regard as the shortest of loans the money which we never shall be …

It was finished at last, and if it was a little formal or high-flown, or stilted, is not a certain formality postulated on momentous occasions?

Who would write that he was “delighted” to accept a bishopric? Who would go to a levée in a straw hat?

Dear Lord Blandamer (the letter ran),

Bellevue Lodge became a centre of attraction. The ladies who had contemned a lodging-house keeper’s daughter courted the betrothed of a peer. From themselves they did not disguise the motive for this change, they did not even attempt to find an excuse in public.

They simply executed their volte face simultaneously and with most commendable regularity, and felt no more reluctance or shame in the process than a cat feels in following the man who carries its meat.

If they were disappointed in not seeing Anastasia herself (for she left for London almost immediately after the engagement was made public), they were in some measure compensated by the extreme readiness of Miss Euphemia to discuss the matter in all its bearings.

For Nature, if she once endows man or woman with romance, gives them so rich a store of it as shall last them, life through, unto the end.

In sickness or health, in poverty or riches, through middle age and old age, through loss of hair and loss of teeth, under wrinkled face and gouty limbs, under crow’s-feet and double chins, under all the least romantic and most sordid malaisances of life, romance endures to the end.

Its price is altogether above rubies; it can never be taken away from those that have it, and those that have it not, can never acquire it for money, nor by the most utter toil—no, nor ever arrive at the very faintest comprehension of it.

He had laid his hand to a repugnant business, and the burden of it was too heavy for him to bear. He felt the same gnawing anxiety, that is experienced by one whom doctors have sentenced to a lethal operation.

One man may bear himself more bravely in such circumstances than another, but by nature every man is a coward;

and the knowledge that the hour is approaching, when the surgeon’s knife shall introduce him to a final struggle of life and death cannot be done away. So it was with Westray;