“He was a tubby little chap who looked as if he had been poured into his clothes and forgotten to say 'when'!”

“She looked as if she had been poured into her clothes and had forgotten to say "when". ”

“A chap's bedroom – you can't get way from it – is his castle, and he has every right to look askance if gargoyles come glaring in at him.”

“He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.”

“He looked haggard and careworn, like a Borgia who has suddenly remembered that he has forgotten to shove cyanide in the consommé, and the dinner-gong due any moment.”

“He couldn’t have moved quicker if he had been the dachshund Poppet, who at this juncture was running round in circles, trying, if I read his thoughts aright, to work off the rather heavy lunch he had had earlier in the afternoon.”

“[He] saw that a peculiar expression had come into his nephew's face; an expression a little like that of a young hindu fakir who having settled himself on his first bed of spikes is beginning to wish that he had chosen one of the easier religions.”