Life & Wisdom Quote by P. G. Wodehouse

Wodehouse lands the joke with a blade: the same “pupils” who keep a woman alive also quietly ruin the reasons she’d want to be. It’s the perfect Wodehouse squeeze-play, turning a practical detail (earning a living) into an existential trap, then phrasing it with such calm symmetry that the cruelty feels almost polite. “Salvation” and “despair” sit side by side like matched cufflinks, and the sentence structure itself becomes the gag: a neat moral equation where the numbers never add up to happiness.

The subtext is less about teaching than about dependency. “They gave her the means” suggests the cold arithmetic of work under capitalism: survival as a transaction. The second clause flips the knife - not “difficult” or “tiring,” but “hardly worth supporting,” a line that treats life as an object you prop up, like a wobbly table. Wodehouse’s genius is in how he lets that bleakness peek through the doily of wit.

Contextually, it’s classic early-20th-century English comedy with a stiff upper lip and a keen eye for social arrangements that pretend to be dignified. The teacher (or governess) is economically necessary, socially marginal, and emotionally drained, trapped between duty and resentment. Wodehouse doesn’t sermonize; he makes the system look ridiculous by making its logic airtight. That’s why it works: the humor arrives as recognition, not exaggeration.