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unearths some literary gems.
Fom The Viaduct Murder, by Ronald Knox:
***The house itself may be condemned to the scrap-heap, but you can always make a golf-course out of the Park. Acres, that for centuries have scorned the weight of the plough, have their stubborn glebe broken with the niblick, and over-populated greens recall the softness and the trimness of earlier lawns. Ghosts of an earlier day will walk there, perhaps, but you can always play through them.***(distrust the author whose second paragraph does not come to ground in the particular)***That Mr. Carmichael, the fourth member of the party, had been a don you knew as soon as he opened his mouth. There was that precision in his utterances, that benignity in his eye, that spontaneity in his willingness to impart information, that no other profession breeds. A perpetual fountain of interesting small-talk, he unnerved his audience with a sense of intellectual repletion which was worse than boredom.***“I agree with you about inference,” said Marryatt, disregarding Carmichael’s last remark—one always did disregard Carmichael’s last remark.***Gordon proceeded to look up the trains with an irritating thoroughness, while Reeves danced with impatience—there is no impatience like that engendered by watching another man look up Bradshaw.***“You see, he was always a very reserved gentleman, Mr. Brotherood was; very silent, if you understand what I mean, in conversation.” (Reeves felt that this was probably a characteristic common to most of Mrs. Bramston’s interlocutors.) “Time and again he’s said to me would I mind leaving him now because he’d got a great deal to do.”***October sun glowed temperately over the links, with the air of a kind old gentleman producing sweetmeats unexpectedly.***The 4.50 from Paston Oatvile had to connect with it for the sake of passengers going on to Paston Whitchurch or Binver, and was still wandering up and down in a siding, flirting with a couple of milk-vans and apparently enjoying itself.***If you say, Has the rain stopped, he won’t say Yes, or No; he’ll say, It has, or It hasn’t. The explanation of that is a perfectly simple one: there is no native word for either in Irish, any more than there is in Latin. And that in its turn throws a very important light on the Irish character——”“Oh, go and throw an important light on your grandmother’s ducks,” said Reeves.***“That’s it,” said Carmichael, opening the door, “I remember once in Eastern Roumelia——” but, as he managed to fall down the step into the passage, the reminiscence was fortunately lost.***“There’s a chewing-gum motif running through life at present which is worrying me more than I can say.”***“An hour,” said Gordon, “cannot be properly measured by the movements of a clock, an inanimate thing which registers time but doesn’t feel it.”***“Do you realize that, quite possibly, Davenant may have stood behind that hole in the wall and heard us coming solemnly to the conclusion that he didn’t exist? That he never had existed, except as a sort of spiritual projection of old Brotherhood, and now, consequently, he had ceased to exist?”***“Carmichael will have it that Davenant is a mode of Brotherhood. Like the materialist or the idealist he is stultifying experience for the sake of a formula....Brotherhood, representing Matter, leaves off where Davenant, representing Spirit, begins. Carmichael, representing the modern mind, finds this an excellent reason for supposing that they are really, somehow, the same thing. The materialist sees Brotherhood everywhere, the Idealist sees Davenant everywhere.”***“There’s one other question I want to ask you, a rather odd one. Have you any reason to think that Davenant was carrying a golf-ball in his pocket when he came up on Tuesday afternoon?”“He might be, of course. But he would hardly have mentioned it, would he?”***"I should be careful how you accuse people of theft merely because their pipes are newly cleaned."***Bonuses:two characters named Masterman referred to collectively as "Mastermen"exclamation points referred to as "shriek-marks."
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