It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage… - Thomas Hardy

It appears that ordinary men take wives because possession is not possible without marriage, and that ordinary women accept husbands because marriage is not possible without possession

Like a greater than himself, to the critical question at the critical time he did not answer: and they were again silent.

Or, to state his character as it stood in the scale of public opinion, when his friends and critics were in tantrums, he was considered rather a bad man; when they were pleased, he was rather a good man; when they were neither, he was a man whose moral colour was a kind of pepper-and-salt mixture.

What at night had been perfect and ideal was by day the more or less defective real.