*    *    *    *    *

It has been well said that an author who expects results
from a first novel is in a position similar to that of a man
who drops a rose petal down the Grand Canyon of Arizona
and listens for the echo.

*    *    *    *    *

The author of Cocktail Time came slowly out of the uneasy dream
in which he had been sustaining the role of the stag at bay.

*    *    *    *    *

Nannie Bruce, a tall, gangling light-heavyweight with a suggestion
in her appearance of a private in the Grenadiers dressed up to play
the title role in Charley's Aunt, was one of those doggedly
faithful retainers who adhere to almost all old families
like barnacles to the hulls of ships...She was as much a fixture
as the stone lions or the funny smell in the attic.

*    *    *    *    *

A captious critic, seeing, as captious critics do, only the dark side,
would have commented on the entire absence from these eyes of anything
like a gleam of human intelligence: but to anyone non-captious this would
have been amply compensated for by their kindliness and honesty.

*    *    *    *    *

And there was, furthermore, the matter of the reformation of Beefy Bastable,
whose attitude toward his sister Phoebe, so like that of a snapping turtle
suffering from ulcers, he was determined to correct.

*    *    *    *    *

Old Mr. Howard Saxby was seated at is desk in his room at the Edgar Saxby
literary agency when Cosmo arrived there. He was knitting a sock.
He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep
himself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep
himself from knitting. He was a long, thin old gentleman in his middle
seventies with a faraway unseeing look in his eye, not unlike that which
a dead halibut on a fishmonger's slab gives the pedestrian as he passes.
It was a look which caused many of those who met him to feel like
disembodied spirits, so manifest was it that they were making absolutely
no impression on his retina. Cosmo, full though he was of roast beef,
roly-poly pudding and Stilton cheese, had the momentary illusion as he
encountered that blank, vague gaze that he was something diaphanous
that had been hurriedly put together with ectoplasm.

*    *    *    *    *

...had Cosmo been an ornithologist, he would have found the old gentleman's
conversation absorbing. But, like so many of us, he could take meadow pipits
or leave them alone, and it was something of the feeling he had had when released
from Brixton prison that at long last he saw the human porous plaster potter off
on some business of his own.

*    *    *    *    *

He had that self-reproachful feeling of having been remiss
which comes to Generals who wake up one morning to discover
that they have carelessly allowed themselves to be outflanked.

*    *    *    *    *

...he saw the opulent young man in person. He was pacing the terrace
with bent head and leaden feet, like a Volga boatman.

*    *    *    *    *