Daily Inspiration Quote by Mary Roberts Rinehart

The joke lands because it pretends to be a simple observation while quietly accusing an entire profession of moral camouflage. Rinehart’s line is built on a small marvel of phrasing: “yet” implies she’s been looking for years, and “admit” turns profit into something shameful, as if earning well is a vice a lawyer must conceal. It’s not that lawyers don’t make money; it’s that they don’t want you to notice the making of it.

The subtext is about the stories professionals tell to stay respectable. Lawyers, especially in early-20th-century America, sit in a cultural crossfire: indispensable to the machinery of business and law, but perpetually suspected of exploiting conflict. Rinehart doesn’t bother with courtroom melodrama. She nails the more everyday performance - the ritual insistence that a fee is merely fair compensation, that the bill is an unfortunate byproduct of duty, that the real motive is service. Her humor relies on the gap between public rhetoric and private economics.

As a novelist who made her living on popular fiction, Rinehart also writes from the knowing side of commerce. She understands how money can be both the engine and the embarrassment of “respectable” work. The line works because it’s less an attack than a diagnosis: in a culture that wants expertise without feeling hustled, the true skill isn’t arguing a case; it’s making the invoice disappear behind principle.