From File for Record, by Alice Tilton:
***
It seemed reasonable to assume that the woman in the tartan slacks would hardly bother to waste the time to knock out a perfect stranger, particularly if she really were in a hurry to frost a cake. And she looked, Leonidas felt, like the sort of woman who well might have a cake to frost.
***
"Never," he said to himself as he picked up his bath towel, "a dull or stodgy moment!"
***
"Don't you see, I wasn't serious? I know nothing about accounts! I only mentioned them because I had to mention something! If I'd thought of cauliflower, I'd have mentioned cauliflower."
***
"I know his face, but I can't place his head. I guess if I seen him, it was with a hat on."
***
"I don't know what impelled me to jump over your hedge--"
"Everybody does," Leonidas interposed. "The grocer boy, his successor, the grocer girl--everyone goes just so far down the driveway, and then some gremlin whispers in their ear and tells them to jump over Mr. Witherall's hedge. I replace those corner privet plants every other year. There's a gap there now named 'Jesse's Gap,' after my vegetable woman."
***
"Henry S. C. Compton," Leonidas said, "is the sort of man who would have held his finger in the dike even if something far handier had been available."
***
"I have a problem of his to solve," Leonidas said. "I faithfully promised I'd attend to it tonight, and thus far I've had no chance even to think of it. I rather feel that if he saw me sitting here among these bickering merrymakers, hugging a papier-mâché lion, he might just possibly get the impression that I was letting him down badly."
***
"Be as ungrammatical as you please, but tell me!"
[...]
"My story is a then-I-went-er," Dave said.
***
Even in a drab gray denim coverall, well splashed with oil, she was one of the most beautiful creatures he ever remembered having seen. Lieutenant Haseltine himself had never met up with anyone quite so ravishing. Not even on the radio.
***
"It began to occur to me that either everyone in the world had turned into a fellow in a turtleneck sweater, or else I was seeing an awful lot of that one lad."
***
"I needed someone to fawn over me and call me mademoiselle at that point."
***
"Oh, perhaps," Suzanne interrupted impatiently, "someone was going somewhere where someone didn't want to be bothered with lugging a briefcase. Or a ledger. I don't like to carp at you boys, but all this perhaps-ing and someone-sing is getting me down!"
***
"We haven't anything to confront him with! We can't confront him with no dog!" [I.e., the suspicious absence of a dog.]
