“...though the conversation always touched an exceptionally high level of brilliance, there was apt to be a good deal of sugar thrown about.”

“Nothing to be done about it except give her a reproachful look. I did this. It made no impression whatever, and she proceeded.”

“Bingo swayed like a jelly in a high wind.”

“That is all, Augustus,' she said, and dismissed me with a gesture of loathing, as if I had been a green-fly that had fallen short of even the very moderate level of decency of the average run-of-the-mill green fly.”

“The general effect was rather as if I had swallowed six-pennorth of dynamite and somebody touched it off inside me.”

“I am strongly of the opinion that, after the age of twenty-one, a man ought not to be out of bed and awake at four in the morning. The hour breeds thought. At twenty-one, life being all future, it may be examined with impunity. But, at thirty, having become an uncomfortable mixture of future and past, it is a thing to be looked at only when the sun is high and the world full of warmth and optimism.”

“I've always treated the man with unremitting kindness, and if he wont do a little thing like this for me, I'll kick his spine through his hat.”