Daily Inspiration Quote by W. Somerset Maugham

Maugham’s line is a perfect little stage whisper: prim, winking, and faintly ruthless about what polite society pretends not to know. The joke hinges on a typographical trick. In Victorian fiction and theater, sex and pregnancy were often handled with the decorum of omission: a fade-out, a tasteful ellipsis, the narrative equivalent of drawing the curtains. The asterisk stands in for what can’t be printed or performed; the “certain interval” is time skipped so the audience can keep its hands clean. Then, obediently, arrives the baby - consequence without the messy cause.

Maugham’s intent isn’t just to mock that prudery; it’s to announce that the trick no longer works. “We have long passed” lands like a cultural verdict: modernity has caught up to biology, and the audience has caught up to itself. You can’t launder desire through punctuation anymore, because everyone recognizes the laundering. The subtext is theatrical and social at once: the stage (and the page) has become a battleground over what can be shown, said, and owned in public.

As a playwright who thrived in drawing-room hypocrisies, Maugham is also taking a jab at the sentimental moral accounting of the period - the idea that you could preserve virtue by refusing to name vice. His wit is barbed because it treats censorship as childish make-believe: cover your eyes, count to ten, and pretend the world has stayed innocent.