#222

'I say,' said Freddie in an awed voice. 'He's a bit of a nut, that lad, what? He reminds me of the troops of Midian in the hymn. The chappies who prowled and prowled around. I'll bet he's worn a groove in the carpet Like a jolly old tiger at the Zoo at feeding time. Wouldn't be surprised at any moment to look down and find him biting a piece out of my leg!'

#221

'Don't you worry, honey!' advised the well-meaning girl who would have been in her element looking in on Job with Bildad the Shuhite and his friends. 'Don't you worry!'

#220

He stared again at Jill. The inspection was long and lingering and affected Jill with a sense of being inadequately clothed. She returned the gaze as defiantly as she could, but her heart was beating fast. She had never yet been frightened of any man, but there was something reptilian about this fat, yellow-haired individual which disquieted her, much as cockroaches had done in her childhood. A momentary thought flashed through her mind that it would be horrible to be touched by him. He looked soft and glutinous.

#219

He was a snub-nosed boy. His ears and hair were vermilion. His name was Ralph. He has seven hundred and forty-three pimples.

#218

No wonder Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoi's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city reservoir, he turns to the cupboard, only to find the vodka-bottle empty.

#217

He was fond of children, but they made the deuce of a noise and regarded jam as an external ornament.

#216

Lady Underhill, having said all she had to say, recovered her breath and begin to say it again. Frequent iteration was one of her strongest weapons.

#215

There are men who fear the repartee of a wife more keenly than a sword. Derek was one of these. Like most men of single outlook, whose dignity is their most precious possession, he winced from an edged tongue....She did not speak the words. If she had an edged tongue, she had also the control of it.

#214

If there is one thing that startles a well-bred Londoner and throws him off his balance, it it to be unexpectedly by a stranger. Freddie's sense of decency was revolted. A voice from the tomb could hardly have shaken him more.

#213

...the little dinner at Freddie Rooke's had not been an unqualified success. Searching the records for an adequately gloomy parallel to the taxi-cab journey to the theatre which followed it, one can only think of Napoleon's retreat from Moscow. And yet even that was probably not conducted in dead silence.

#212

This woman always made Freddie feel as if he were being disemboweled by some clumsy amateur.

#211

'Barker!' His voice had a ring of pain.
'Sir?'
'What's this?'
'Poached egg, sir.'
Freddie averted his eyes with a silent shudder.
'It looks just like an old aunt of mine,' he said. 'Remove it.'

#210

'Me! Dash it all, how old do you think I am? I'm only nineteen,'

'I had suspected as much from the alabaster clearness of your unwrinkled brow.'

#209

'What rot it all is!' went on Mike, sitting down again. 'What's the good of it all? You go and sweat all day at a desk, day after day, for about twopence a year. And when you're about eighty-five, you retire. It isn't living at all. It's simply being a bally vegetable.'

#208

If one looks closely into the actions which are apparently due to sudden impulse, one generally finds that  the sudden impulse was merely the last of a long series of events which led up to the action. Alone, it could not have been powerful enough to effect anything. But, coming after the way has been paved for it, it is irresistible.

#207

Mr Bickersdyke shifted uneasily on his sofa. He glared at the floor. Then he eyed the ceiling as if it were a personal enemy of his...Addressed thus directly, the manager allowed his gaze to wander from the ceiling. He eyed Psmith for a moment like an elderly basilisk, then looked back at the ceiling.

#206

Young Mr Richards was sitting on the sofa, moodily turning the leaves of a photograph album, which contained portraits of Master Edward Waller in geometrically progressing degrees of repulsiveness - here, in frocks, looking like a gargoyle; there, in sailor suit, looking like nothing on earth. The inspection of these was obviously deepening Mr Richards' gloom, but he proceeded doggedly with it.

#205

Comrade Prebble beamed and took the floor. Mike began to realize that, till now, he had never known what boredom meant. There had been moments in his life which had been less interesting than other moments, but nothing to touch this for agony. Comrade Prebble's address streamed on like water rushing over a weir.

#204

'Women,' said Psmith, helping himself to trifle, and speaking with the air of one launched upon his special subject, 'are, one must recollect, like - like - er, well, in fact, just so. Passing on lightly from that conclusion...'

#203

It would have been plain to the most casual observer that Mr Waller was fond and proud of his son. The cashier was a widower, and after five minutes' acquaintance with Edward, Mike felt strongly that Mrs Waller was the lucky one.

#202

They had been audible all the time, very much so, but now they grew in volume. Comrade Wotherspoon was a tall, thin man with side-whiskers and a high voice. He scattered his aitches as a fountain its sprays in a strong wind. He was in earnest.

#201

'Comrad Bristow sneaks off and buys a sort of woolen sunset. I saw the thing unexpectedly. I tell you I was shaken. It is the suddenness of that waistcoat which hits you. It's discouraging, this sort of thing. I try always to think well of my fellow man. As an energetic Socialist, I do my best to see the good that is in him, but it's hard. Comrade Bristow's the most striking argument against the equality of man I've ever come across.'

#200

'You are Agesilaus,' he said. 'I am the petulant Pterodactyl. You, if I may say so, butted in of your own free will, and took me from a happy home, simply in order that you might get me into this place under you, and give me beans. But, curiously enough, the major portion of that vegetable seems to be coming to you.'

#199

I can rough it. We are old campaigners, we Psmiths. Give us a roof, a few comfortable chairs, a sofa or two, half a dozen cushions, and decent meals, and we do not repine.

#198

Mr Waller ordered lunch with the care of one to whom lunch is no slight matter. Few workers in the City do regard lunch as a trivial affair. It is the keynote of their day. It is an oasis in a dessert of ink and ledgers. Conversation in City offices deals, in the morning, with what one is going to have for lunch, and in the afternoon with what one had for lunch.

#197

'It's a nice room,' said the pantomime dame. Which was a black lie. It was not a nice room. It had never been a nice room. And it did not seem at all probable that it ever would be a nice room. But it looked cheap. That was the great thing. Nobody could have the assurance to charge much for a room like that. A land lady with a conscience might even have gone to the length of paying people some small sum by way of compensation to them for sleeping in it.

#196

Psmith's attitude towards the slings and arrows of outrageous Fortune was to regard them with a bland smile, as if they were part of an entertainment got up for his express benefit.

#195

Sunday supper, unless done on a large and informal scale, is probably the most depressing meal in existence. There is a chill discomfort in the round of beef, an icy severity about the open jam tart. The blancmange shivers miserably. Spirituous liquor helps to counteract the influence of these things, and so does exhilarating conversation.

#194

'Miss Simmons, we must act! We must act!'
'Yes, but not like idiots,' replied the detective frostily.

#193

'Mr Baxter!'
'Yes, Miss Halliday?'
The Brain of Blandings looked abstractedly up from his desk. It was only some half-hour since luncheon had finished, but already he was in the library surrounded by large books like a sea-beast among rocks. Most of his time was spent in the library when the castle was full of guests, for his lofty mind was ill-attuned to the frivolous babblings of Society butterflies.