His name is Albert Campion,” she said. “He came down in Anne Edgeware’s car and the first thing he did when he introduced himself was to show me a conjuring trick with a two-headed penny – he’s quite inoffensive, just a silly ass.
He did not arrive at this conclusion by the decent process of quiet, logical deduction, nor yet by the blinding flash of glorious intuition, but by the shoddy, untidy process halfway between the two by which one usually gets to know things.
Self-satisfaction is the state of mind of those who have the happy conviction that they are not as other men.
Outrage, combining as it does shock, anger, reproach, and helplessness, is perhaps the most unmanageable, the most demoralizing of all the emotions.
It is always difficult to escape from youth; its hopefulness, its optimistic belief in the privileges of desire, its despair, and its sense of outrage and injustice at disappointment, all these spring on a man inflicting indelicate agony when he is no longer prepared.
It’s easy enough to make the truth look silly. A man never seems more foolish-like than he does when he’s speaking his whole mind and heart.
When the habitually even-tempered suddenly fly into a passion, that explosion is apt to be more impressive than the outburst of the most violent amongst us.
Good doctors get a mechanic’s pleasure in making you tick over.
I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.
He used to be a burglar, you know. It’s the old story – lost his figure. As he says himself, it cramps your style when your only means of exit are the double doors in the front hall.
Mr. Campion felt that among the ordeals by fire and by water there should now be numbered the ordeal by dinner at Socrates Close.
Lying wastes more time than anything else in the modern world.
Mourning is not forgetting,’ he said gently, his helplessness vanishing and his voice becoming wise. ‘It is an undoing. Every minute tie has to be untied and something permanent and valuable recovered and assimilated from the knot. The end is gain, of course. Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be made strong, in fact. But the process is like all other human births, painful and long and dangerous.
Most oddly he was not frightened. That alone he had learned from experience. With the danger would come the courage.
Women are terribly shocking to men, my dear. Don’t understand them. Like them. It saves such a lot of hurting one way and the other.
THE main thing to remember in autobiography, I have always thought, is not to let any damned modesty creep in to spoil the story. This adventure is mine, Albert Campion’s, and I am fairly certain that I was pretty nearly brilliant in it in spite of the fact that I so nearly got myself and old Lugg killed that I hear a harp quintet whenever I consider it.
As I see it, the word “private” is going plumb out of date. It’s goin’ to be an ole-fashioned concep’, mark my words. That’s a prophecy.
Consider, o consider the lowly mole. His small hands are sore and his snout bleedeth.
George Abbershaw’s prosaic mind quivered on the verge of poetry when he looked at her.
I always understood that the idea of education was to get one’s mind as sharp as it will come before the party starts. Once the heart gets going you need all the wits you’ve got, my goodness.