*    *    *    *    *

'So!' he said, and his voice was cold and hard, like a picnic egg.

*    *    *    *    *

The eyes behind their horn-rimmed spectacles were burning with fury and resentment
and all that sort of thing. He looked like a peevish halibut. In moments of emotion
Gussie's resemblance to some marine monsters became accentuated.

*    *    *    *    *

She smiled in a steely sort of way, like one of those women in the
Old Testament who used to go about driving spikes into people's heads.

*    *    *    *    *

The village hall stood in the middle of the High Street, just abaft the duck-pond.
Erected in the year 1881 by Sir Quintin Deverill, a man who didn't know much about
architecture but knew what he liked, it was one of those mid-Victorian jobs in
glazed red brick which always seem to bob up in these olde-worlde hamlets and do
so much to encourage the drift to the towns. Its interior, like those of all the
joints of its kind I've ever come across, was dingy and fuggy and smelled in equal
proportions of apples, chalk, damp plaster, Boy Scouts and the sturdy English
peasantry.

*    *    *    *    *

'I tell you, Gussied, if you were to put a bit of gorgonzola cheese on the slide
of a microscope and tell me to take a look, the first thing I'd say on getting it
focused would be: "Why, hallo, Rooster!"'

*    *    *    *    *

A tall drooping man, looking as if he had been stuffed in a hurry
by an incompetent taxidermist..

*    *    *    *    *

It was loud in spots and less loud in other spots, and it had that quality
which I have noticed in all violin solos, of seeming to last much longer
than it actually did.

*    *    *    *    *

At these frightful words, the spirit of the Roosters felt as if it had been sat
on by an an elephant. And not one of your streamlined, schoolgirl-figured
elephants, either. A big, fat one.

*    *    *    *    *