Wealth & Money Quote by Anthony Trollope

The line lands like a polite dagger: wealth, Trollope implies, is most efficiently acquired not through talent or toil but through a correctly arranged marriage. The genius is in the pairing of "easy" and "respectable". Easy admits the grubby truth everyone in his world recognizes - that money can be married into. Respectable supplies the moral alibi. Matrimony, the era's most sanctified institution, doubles as the cleanest laundering mechanism for ambition.

Trollope is writing from inside Victorian England's social machinery, where property, inheritance, and women's limited economic options made marriage less romance than infrastructure. The sentence reads as a wry summary of the marriage market: people are priced, vetted, traded upward. It flatters the listener's sensibility while indicting it. You can almost hear the conversational tone of a drawing room, the kind of remark delivered with a smile that dares anyone to object without seeming naive.

The subtext is not simply "people are cynical". It's that society has built a system where cynicism is rational. When careers are gated by class, and wealth is protected by law and lineage, the "road" metaphor stings: most roads are supposed to reward effort, but this one rewards access. Trollope's irony also nudges at gendered asymmetry. For men, matrimony is a strategy; for women, often the only strategy available. The line performs a neat moral inversion: the most "respectable" route is also the most transactional, and everyone knows it.