Pelf

"Thus roused, her friends she gathers. All await / her summons, who the tyrant fear or hate. / Some ships at hand, chance-anchored in the bay / they seize and load them with the costly freight, / and far off o'er the deep is borne away / Pygmalion's hoarded pelf. A woman leads the way."

Raph. Sirra Hammon Hammon, dost thou thinke a shooe-maker is so base, to be a bawd to his own wife for cõmodity! take thy gold, choake with it: were I not lame, I would make thee eate thy words. Firke. A shoomaker sell his flesh and blood, oh indignitie! Hodg. Sirra, take up your pelfe, and be packing.

For what greater folly can there be, or madneſſe, then to […] keepe backe from his wife and children, neither letting them, nor other friends uſe or enjoy that which is theirs by right, and which they much need perhaps; like a hog, or dog in the manger, he doth onely keep it, becauſe it ſhall doe no body elſe good, hurting himſelfe and others; and for a little momentary pelfe, damne his owne ſoule.

During his Office, Treaſon was no Crime. / The Sons of Belial had a Glorious Time: / For Shimei, though not prodigal of pelf, / Yet lov'd his wicked Neighbour as himſelf.

The inscriptions on the walls are homilies from the Koran—actual 'sermons in stones'. The inlaid characters in diamond, and other precious stones, have been all abstracted away by the pelf-loving Jaut and Mahratta—leaving the walls defaced with the hollow marks of the chisel.

But, sighing after his fancies and visionary pursuits, he rebelled and fled fifty miles away for refuge from the lace caps and powdered wigs of his priggish sitters, and resumed his quaint dreams and immeasurable phantasies, never more to forsake them for pelf and portraiture.

When you get what you want in your struggle for pelf, and the world makes you King for a day, / Then go to the mirror and look at yourself, and see what that guy has to say.

Some of the rich classmates were keeping their pelf to themselves.

In advertising, show business, and journalism, people work themselves to the nub for glitz and glory more than for pelf.

She writes about those she might have known first-hand: teenage girls cowering in bunkers … friends making promises they can never keep … rich folk fattened on wartime pelf, poor folk surviving by wit alone.