“The growth of intimacy is like that. First one gives off his best picture, the bright and finished product mended with bluff and falsehood and humor. Then more details are  required and one paints a second portrait, and  a third—before long the best lines cancel out—and the secret is exposed at last; the planes of the pictures have intermingled and  given us away, and though we paint and paint we can no longer sell a picture.  We must be satisfied with hoping that such fatuous accounts of ourselves as we make to our wives and children and business associates are accepted   as true.”

From “The Beautiful and Damned” by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Fitzgerald’s style resembles more those of British authors than American writers’. His prose is elegant and formal like Jane Austen’s or William Trevor’s. To a large extent, the featured paragraph applies to us all. But Fitzgerald usually wrote about the rich, so the portrait he paints mainly pertains to members of the high society where hypocrisy reigns.