Landed Gentry: A Comedy in Four Acts

by W. Somerset Maugham

Cobbett.

[Coolly.] In point of fact she’s done a great deal more than you have. She’s been found out.

Grace.

How can you be so odiously cynical?

Cobbett.

I notice people always call you odiously cynical when you talk plain horse-sense to them.

Grace.

Can’t you realise what I’m feeling? She had excuses. She was alone, and little more than a child; she had no education. How could she be expected to resist temptation?

Cobbett.

It’s an absolute delusion that the lower classes are less able to resist temptation than their betters. In the first place, they have a much more systematic moral education, and then they’re taught from early youth to look upon virtue as a valuable asset.