Marriage Quote by Elizabeth Gaskell

A social misfire is being recast here as a moral victory, and Gaskell knows exactly how funny that is. The speaker begins with the prim politeness of a drawing-room report - "Madam your wife and I didn't hit it off" - then slips the stiletto in with the faux-generous restraint of "I won't say she was silly". That refusal is performative: it advertises the insult while pretending to spare it. The punchline, "one of us was silly, and it wasn't me", lands with the clipped certainty of someone who understands that in polite society, certainty is power.

The intent is less to diagnose the wife's character than to establish the speaker's own status in the conversation: reasonable, discerning, above petty cattiness. Gaskell is satirizing a culture where reputations are negotiated through implication and tone rather than explicit accusation. "Only time I ever saw her" is doing quiet work, too. It signals that the judgment is both sweeping and, conveniently, untestable - a single encounter inflated into definitive proof, which is how social narratives often form.

Contextually, this fits Gaskell's broader preoccupation with class manners, female respectability, and the domestic sphere as a battleground of soft power. The line lets us watch someone weaponize civility: an insult laundered through etiquette, delivered with a smile, and made airtight by the claim of self-evident innocence. In Gaskell's world, the sharpest cruelty is the kind that can still pass as good manners.