*    *    *    *    *

...but then she was always a woman who tends to bring plaster
falling from the ceiling when amused.

*    *    *    *    *

She snorted with a sudden violence which twenty-four hours earlier
would have unmanned me completely. Even in my present tolerably
robust condition, it affected me like one of those gas explosions
which slay six.

*    *    *    *    *

Prismatic is the only word for those frightful tweeds and, oddly enough,
the spectacle of them had the effect of steadying my nerves.
They gave me the feeling that nothing mattered.

*    *    *    *    *

Old Bassett had been listening to these courtesies with a dazed
expression on the map - gulping a bit from time to time, like a fish
that had been hauled out of a pond on a bent pin and isn't at all
sure it is equal to the pressure.

*    *    *    *    *

"Oh Bertie,"she said, in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug.

*    *    *    *    *

I don't know if you have had the same experience, but a thing I
have found in life is that from time to time, as you jog along, there
occur moments which you are able to recognize immediately with
the naked eye as high spots. Something tells you that they are going
to remain etched, if etched is the word I want, for ever on the
memory and will come back to you at intervals down the years, as
you are dropping off to sleep, banishing that drowsy feeling and
causing you to leap on the pillow like a gaffed salmon.

*    *    *    *    *

I don't suppose she would recognize a deep, beautiful thought
if you handed it to her on a skewer with tartar sauce.

*    *    *    *    *

...a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap...

*    *    *    *    *

...he was constitutionally incapable of walking through the great Gobi desert
without knocking something over.

*    *    *    *    *

The clifflike mass looming over me was Roderick Spode.

*    *    *    *    *

"You have disappointed me. I thought you had guts."
"I have, and I don't want Roderick Spode fooling about with them."

*    *    *    *    *

I now gazed at him hopefully, like a seal awaiting a bit of fish.

*    *    *    *    *

I felt a trifle boneless.

*    *    *    *    *

"He is probably on the roof, wondering how he can pull it up after him."

*    *    *    *    *

...I turned to the intruder and gave him a long, level stare, in which
surprise and hauteur were nicely blended.

*    *    *    *    *

Really, one gets about as much privacy in this house as a strip-tease dancer.

*    *    *    *    *

Think feudally, Jeeves.

*    *    *    *    *

The dog hopped from the bed and, advancing into the middle of the room,
took a seat, breathing through the nose with a curious whistling sound
and looking at us from under his eyebrows like a Scottish elder
rebuking sin from the pulpit.

*    *    *    *    *

...one of those girls in equal quantities the gall of an army mule
and the calm insouciance of a fish on a slab of ice.

*    *    *    *    *

...a sort of hideous ingenuity in the way he thought up new methods of ruin.

*    *    *    *    *

...his head emerged cautiously, like a snail taking a look around
after a thunderstorm.

*    *    *    *    *

...the way he eats asparagus alters one's whole conception of Man
as Nature's last word.

*    *    *    *    *

She rose, and broke the elephant thoughtfully.

*    *    *    *    *

"You can't be a successful Dictator and design women's underclothing."

*    *    *    *    *

I'm so happy I could bite a grape.