Heart-break is a very old-fashioned disorder, associated with poverty of the brain. - George Gissing

Poverty doesn’t allow of honourable feeling, any more than of compassion.

Exquisite as an artistic product of Society, she affected the imagination not so much by her personal charm as through the perfume of luxury which breathed about her. Egremont, with his radical tendencies of thought, found himself marvelling as he regarded her; what a life was hers! Compare it with that of some little work-girl in Lambeth, such as he saw in the street — what spaces between those two worlds!

All the pedantry of her daily toil slipped away like a cumbrous garment; she was clad only in her womanhood.