No nice girl should ever waltz with such particularly younger sons! It looks so fast! Good resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws. Their origin is pure vanity. Their result is absolutely nil. They give us now and then some of those luxurious, sterile emotions that have a certain charm for the weak. That is all that can be said for them. They are simply cheques that men draw on a bank where they have no account. What is the difference between literature and journalism? Journalism is unreadable and literature is unread. I hope you have not been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good all the time. That would be hypocrisy. My husband is a sort of promissory note; I am tired of meeting him. Conscience makes egotists of us all. Never trust a woman who wears mauve, whatever her age may be, or a woman over thirty-five who is fond of pink ribbons. It always means that they have a history. There is a fatality about good resolutions-they are always made too late. We can have in life but one great experience at best, and the secret of life is to reproduce that experience as often as possible. Anybody can be good in the country. There are no temptations there. That is the reason why people who live out of town are so absolutely uncivilised. Civilisation is not by any means an easy thing to attain to. There are only two ways by which man can reach it. One is by being cultured, the other by being corrupt. Country people have no opportunity of being either, so they stagnate. What nonsense people talk about happy marriages! A man can be happy with any woman so long as he does not love her. The things one feels absolutely certain about are never true. That is the fatality of faith and the lesson of romance. In the common world of fact the wicked are not punished nor the good rewarded. Success is given to the strong, failure thrust upon the weak. Nothing should be able to harm a man except himself. Nothing should be able to rob a man at all. What a man really has is what is in him. What is outside of him should be a matter of no importance. Modern morality consists in accepting the standard of one's age. I consider that for any man of culture to accept the standard of his age is a form of the grossest immorality. Perplexity and mistrust fan affection into passion, and so bring about those beautiful tragedies that alone make life worth living. Women once felt this, while men did not, and so women once ruled the world. Sin is a thing that writes itself across a man's, face. It cannot be concealed. People talk sometimes of secret vices. There are no such things. If a wretched man has a vice it shows itself in the lines of his mouth, the drop of his eyelids, the moulding of his hands even.