#barsetshire chronicles

Fortnight of Books 2024: Day 7

"All the same, she gave him a terribly bad life of it, if all is true that we hear." "There are men who must have what you call a terribly bad life of it, whatever way it goes with them. The bishop is weak, and he wants somebody near to him to be strong. She was strong,—perhaps too strong; but he had his advantage out of it. After all I don't know that his life has been so terribly bad. I daresay he's had everything very comfortable about him. And a man ought to be grateful for that, though very few men ever are."

He could not endure to have to own himself to have been in the wrong, but he could be content with a very incomplete recognition of his having been in the right.

"They are as like each other as two peas," she said, "and though each of them wished to be generous, neither of them would condescend to be just."

I know a man,—an excellent fellow, who, being himself a strong politician, constantly expresses a belief that all politicians opposed to him are thieves, child-murderers, parricides, lovers of incest, demons upon the earth. He is a strong partisan, but not, I think, so strong as Mrs. Proudie. He says that he believes all evil of his opponents; but she really believed the evil. The archdeacon had called Mrs. Proudie a she-Beelzebub; but that was a simple ebullition of mortal hatred. He believed her to be simply a vulgar, interfering, brazen-faced virago. Mrs. Proudie in truth believed that the archdeacon was an actual emanation from Satan, sent to those parts to devour souls,—as she would call it,—and that she herself was an emanation of another sort, sent from another source expressly to Barchester, to prevent such devouring, as far as it might possibly be prevented by a mortal agency.

She was gorgeous in a dark brown silk dress of awful stiffness and terrible dimensions; and on her shoulders she wore a short cloak of velvet and fur, very handsome withal, but so swelling in its proportions on all sides as necessarily to create more of dismay than of admiration in the mind of any ordinary man. And her bonnet was a monstrous helmet with the beaver up, displaying the awful face of the warrior, always ready for combat, and careless to guard itself from attack. The large contorted bows which she bore were as a grisly crest upon her casque, beautiful, doubtless, but majestic and fear-compelling.

"I don't think she will ever allow herself to indulge in an unauthorized passion," said Mrs. Grantly. "I am sure she will not," said Lady Lufton, with ready agreement, fearing perhaps in her heart that Griselda would never indulge in any passion, authorized or unauthorized.

"I am quite sure she was right in accepting him, Bell," she said, putting down the book as the light was fading, and beginning to praise the story. "It was a matter of course," said Bell. "It always is right in the novels. That's why I don't like them. They are too sweet." "That's why I do like them, because they are so sweet. A sermon is not to tell you what you are, but what you ought to be, and a novel should tell you not what you are to get, but what you'd like to get." "If so, then, I'd go back to the old school, and have the heroine really a heroine, walking all the way up from Edinburgh to London, and falling among thieves; or else nursing a wounded hero, and describing the battle from the window. We've got tired of that; or else the people who write can't do it now-a-days. But if we are to have real life, let it be real." "No, Bell, no!" said Lily. "Real life sometimes is so painful."