From J. I. M. Stewart's A Palace of Art:

***

"If not a palazzo, a palazzina. Or, say, a palazzotto." Dictionary patter of this sort was also characteristic of Domberg.

***

"I've forgotten if you smoke?"

For a moment Chevalley appeared to have forgotten too. Then he shook his head.

***

[Domberg disapproves of his own joke.]

"Mrs. Montacute master-minded the thing. Or mistress-minded it." Domberg paused on this joke, and appeared not to approve of it.

***

The way the French treat their wine! Without ceremony, you might call it. But the same stuff is better there than here, all the same. A living relationship is what's involved. It might be the same with art. Finer if handled more freely. Not made a thing of, you might say.

***

"Do I begin to make myself clear?"

The philosophic Domberg paused for a moment on this note of serious interrogation, and was rewarded by Thurkle with at least the ghost of a nod.

***

Perhaps she'd glimpsed him on television, talking about polyphonic music or the pound sterling. It could only have been a glimpse, since she always turned that sort of programme off.

***

Gloria felt she must by no means counter or abridge this small enclave of adolescent Sehnsucht in her almost undeviatingly rational friend. (Gloria didn't, indeed, employ this sort of language to herself. But chroniclers have their occasional privileges.)

***

They paused outside for a few moments to assure one another that it had all been great fun--just as if they were forty-year-olds at the end of a party that hadn't quite come off.

***

Gloria was alone, and in front of her on the table stood an espresso. To Octavius's eye the minute cup, not quite filled with the blackest of black coffee, bore an austere and even forbidding appearance. He realized that he was going to be very easily unnerved.

***

You played [rugby] for England on the strength of a certain radical masculinity which wasn't a bit relevant when deciding whether a Sacred Conversation, or a Madonna with Donors, or a Saint Somebody in his Study, was by this artist or that.

***

Gloria applied herself to sorting out this and that. But neither this nor that was among her more intimate affairs.

***

Drop your job-satisfaction-quotient too far and it was mathematically--or was it psychologically?--impossible to do the job well.

***

It had been what a psychologist (or was it an economist?) would have called counterproductive.

***

She had come to think of the world as consisting of small equivocal queues.

***

Jake chucked the packet in the air as if it was a tennis-ball and smacked it with an open hand. It flew across the bar and landed in the lap of a stout lady drinking Guinness. Nobody seemed annoyed, least of all the stout lady. It was a friendly sort of bar.

***

The suiting didn't suit him.