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Updated: July 10, 2025
What a life that would be!... Am I mad, to waste my time and trouble for the magnificent pleasure of being a prey to the judgment of idiots? Is it not much better and finer to be loved and understood by a few honest men than to be heard, criticised, and toadied by thousands of fools?... The devil of pride and thirst for fame shall never again take me: trust me for that!"
He had never intrigued or cajoled for preferment, but had done the work that lay nearest him. At Oxford he had toadied no one. And his 'record, as the Americans say, in that parish in the southeast of London, was unblemished and even noble. But he made a hash of it that evening, somehow. Nan Beresford grew more and more depressed and disheartened almost ashamed.
I became intensely anxious that people should have their letters delivered to them punctually. But my hope to rise had always been built on the writing of novels, and at last by the writing of novels I had risen. I do not think that I ever toadied any one, or that I have acquired the character of a tuft-hunter.
I've toadied Lady Susan, I've gossiped with Miss Pinsent, I've pretended to be shocked with Mrs. Ainger. Respectability! It was the one thing in life that I was sure I didn't care about, and it's grown so precious to me that I've stolen it because I couldn't get it in any other way." She moved across the room and returned to his side with another laugh. "I who used to fancy myself unconventional!
He took your decision in silence 'ware Rokesle when he is quiet! Eh, I know the man, 'tisn't for nothing that these ten years past I have studied his whims, pampered his vanity, lied to him, toadied him! You admire my candor? faith, yes, I am very candid. I am Rokesle's hanger-on; he took me out of the gutter, and in my fashion I am grateful. And you?
All the old slavish formulae of deference and respect "Your Grace," "Your Ladyship," "My Lord" that used to run so glibly off our tongues whenever we had a chance, are now left to servants and shopkeepers; and my slight experience of them, for one, is that they do not want to be toadied a bit, and that they are very polite, well-bred, and most agreeable people.
Garded's great sin, in Miss Ruff's eye, that she toadied Lady Ruth to such an extent as to be generally willing to play with her. Now it was notorious in Littlebath that she had never played well, and that she had long since forgotten all she had ever known.
Kedzie would once have ridiculed them as "amachoors"; now she wished that she, too, were only an "amaturr" instead of a reformed professional. If some of the ladies snubbed her she found others that cultivated her; a few of the humbler women even toadied to her position; a few of the men snuggled up to her picturesque beauty. She snubbed them with vigor.
The public hated and despised him; even his so-called friends and business associates toadied to him merely because they feared him. And this judge this father he had persecuted and ruined, what a better man and citizen he was, how much more worthy of a child's love and of the esteem of the world!
Like John o'Gaunt his name is dear to him, as dear as the coat and crest he toadied for, on a bend sable a spear or steeled argent, honorificabilitudinitatibus, dearer than his glory of greatest shakescene in the country. What's in a name? That is what we ask ourselves in childhood when we write the name that we are told is ours. A star, a daystar, a firedrake, rose at his birth.
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