Nobody ever wants to do anything except what they are not allowed to do.
His brow was sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought and his air that of a man who, if he had said ″Hullo, girls″, would have said it like someone in a Russian drama announcing that Grandpapa had hanged himself in the barn.
A more practised physiognomist would have been able to interpret that look. It was the one that butlers always wear when they have allowed themselves to be persuaded against their better judgement into becoming accessories before the fact in the theft of their employers’ pigs.
I don’t mind admitting that, whenever I looked at Cyril’s face, I always had a feeling that he couldn’t have got that way without its being mostly his own fault.
Upon Mr Stoker replying that he did not care what he had promised or what he had not promised and continuing to asseverate that not a penny of his money should be expended in the direction indicated, his lordship, I regret to say, became somewhat unguarded in his speech.
That’s all, except for the Choir-Boys’ Hundred Yards Handicap, for a pewtermug presented by the vicar – open to all whose voices have not broken before the second Sunday in Epiphany.
All a publisher has to do is write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work.
I wonder if you have noticed a rather rummy thing about it – viz. that it is everywhere. You can’t get away from it. Love, I mean. Wherever you go, there it is, buzzing along in every class of life. Quite remarkable.
You don’t need a hat to tax a man with stealing a pig,′ said the Hon. Galahad, who was well versed in the manners and rules of good society.
Especially if the girl he had earmarked was one of these tough modern thugs, all lipstick and cool, hard, sardonic eyes, as she probably was.
Then they appeared to ooze off, for all became quiet save for the lapping of the waves on the shore. And, by Jove, so sedulously did these waves lap that gradually a drowsiness crept over me and not ten minutes after I had made up my mind that I should never get to sleep again in this world I was off as comfortably as a babe or suckling.
But dragons are one thing and aunts are another.
I can conceive that after what occurred in New York it might be distressing for you to encounter Miss Stoker, sir. But I fancy the contingency need scarcely arise.’ I weighed this. ‘When you start talking about contingencies arising, Jeeves, the brain seems to flicker and I rather miss the gist. Do you mean that I ought to be able to keep out of her way?
In the past she had been compelled to describe this man as a hunk of cheese and to express the opinion that his crookedness was such as to enable him to hide at will behind a spiral staircase; but now, in the joy of this unexpected reunion, all these harsh views were forgotten.
He’s like one of those weird chappies in India who dissolve themselves into thin air and nip through space in a sort of disembodied way and assemble the parts again just where they want them. I’ve got a cousin who’s what they call a Theosophist, and he says he’s often nearly worked the thing himself, but couldn’t quite bring it off, probably owing to having fed in his boyhood on the flesh of animals slain in anger and pie.
He looked like a horse with a secret sorrow. He coughed three times, like a horse who, in addition to a secret sorrow, had contracted asthma.
I don’t know anything that braces one up like finding you haven’t got to get married after all.
I suppose I must be one of the neurotic younger generation you read about in the papers nowadays, because it was pretty plain within half a second that I wasn’t strong and I wasn’t phlegmatic.
She was a kind-hearted girl, and it irked her to have to be continually acting as a black frost in Freddie’s garden of dreams.
I eluded them, therefore, with no great expenditure of physical effort, but I would be deceiving my public if I said that I was enjoying the episode. It offends one’s pride when one has to leap like a lamb in Springtime at the bidding of an elderly little Gawd-help-us with whom it is impossible to reason.