"Fame nowadays is little else but notoriety," said Etoile with a certain scorn, "and it is dearly bought, perhaps too dearly, by the sacrifice of the serenity of obscurity, the loss of the peace of private life. Art is great and precious, but the pursuit of it is sadly embittered when we have become so the plaything of the public, through it, that the simplest actions of our lives are chronicled and misconstrued. You do not believe it, perhaps, but I often envy the women sitting at their cottage doors, with their little children on their knees; no one talks of them!"
"J'ai tant de gloire, ô roi, que j'aspire au fumier!"
said Lady Cardiff. "You are very thankless to Fate, my dear, but I suppose it is always so."
And Lady Cardiff took refuge in her cigar case, being a woman of too much experience not to know that it is quite useless to try and make converts to your opinions; and especially impossible to convince people dissatisfied with their good fortune that they ought to be charmed with it.
"It is very curious," she thought when she got into her own carriage, "really it makes one believe in that odd doctrine of, what is it, Compensations; but, certainly, people of great talent always are a little mad. If they're not flightily mad with eccentricity and brandy, they are morbidly mad with solitude and sentiment. Now she is a great creature, really a great creature; might have the world at her feet if she liked; and all she cares for is a big dog, a bunch of roses, and some artist or poet dead and gone three hundred or three thousand years! It is very queer. It is just like that extraordinary possession of Victor Hugo's; with powers that might have sufficed to make ten men brilliant and comfortable, he must vex and worry about politics that didn't concern him in the least, and go and live under a skylight in the middle of the sea. It is very odd. They are never happy; but when they are unhappy, and if you tell them that Addison could be a great writer, and yet live comfortably and enjoy the things of this world, they only tell you contemptuously that Addison had no genius, he had only a Style. I suppose he hadn't. I think if I were one of them and had to choose, I would rather have only a Style too."
When passion and habit long lie in company it is only slowly and with incredulity that habit awakens to find its companion fled, itself alone.
A new acquaintance is like a new novel; you open it with expectation, but what you find there seldom makes you care to take it off the shelf another time.