Hypocrisy seemed to be the fashionable equivalent of propriety, discretion indistinguishable from morality, and the.
I don’t know who had the training of you,” he continued doggedly, “but your morals are shocking. You spent a night in my bed, remember, after a night in a bawdy house. You go about collecting street urchins and letting inebriated vagabonds kiss you, and then you get into brawls in pawnshops. You are probably past all redemption, but I’m going to reform you anyhow. If you behave yourself, perhaps I’ll let you reform me on occasion, but I make no promises.
In my dictionary, romance is not maudlin, treacly sentiment. It is a curry, spiced with excitement, and humour, and a healthy dollop of cynicism.
The witless destroy what they don’t understand.
Gout, I understand, has reformed a great many rogues.
The Vizier is a genius, truly, if he can keep peace among three hundred women. I can’t do so with only one.
He started to draw away but she wasn’t ready. She held on, and after a heartbeat he slid his hands to her waist and pulled her closer. His kiss grew more fiercely determined, as though he would wipe every recollection of anything remotely resembling kisses from her mind and imprint his, permanently, upon it. And upon her body, where the alien feelings simmered into excitement and happiness and a yearning for more. Strange.
No good would come of trying to make something of a man with a brain like machinery.
Everybody knew gentlemen could be obtuse, especially when it came to matters of the heart. Everybody knew, as well, that gentlemen needed to believe they were in charge. Therefore, ladies had to learn ways of communicating the obvious without being obvious about it.
What would you have done?” Esme demanded. “Screamed for help, of course. But it would never occur to you to call for help. You don’t just think you’re a warrior. You think you’re a whole army.
Charm of the most insidious kind: humorous, self-deprecating, and disarmingly frank and confiding.
At that moment she heard from the room beyond the terrifying noises by means of which primitive man once warned away the creatures skulking near his cave at night. She crept closer to the door and listened. It was true. Mr. Demowery was snoring.
Thanks to Mr. Grose’s Lexicon Balatronicum, Olympia knew a buffer nabber was a dog stealer.
Surely she’d heard voices like his, so low-pitched as to make every commonplace utterance seem of the deepest intimacy, every cliche a delicious secret.
You’ve the Devil’s own tongue, and all his arts, I’m sure. You’re like the bad angel, whispering in my ear – and I always listen.
In the real, grown-up world, unicorns were more plentiful than Prince Charmings.
What have you done to my dairy?” he said. “What happened to the Black Hole of Calcutta I was saving for the setting of the Gothic horror play I was going to write one of these days? Where are all my beautiful spiders? Where are my gloomy corners, where ghoulies might lurk? What have you done with the six inches of dirt on the floor? That was good dirt. I was saving it.
By and large the aristocracy was intelligent enough. The problem was that its members had no need to live by their wits. Thus their wits atrophied. If they could not rely upon the sharper instincts and abundant common sense of their servants, the British upper classes would destroy themselves through sheer inertness.
Maybe the brutal bedding had destroyed a part of her brain.
If you want respect, you must take your medicine like a brave aristocrat,” he said. “Think of the French nobles who walked to the guillotine, double chins aloft.