From various J. K. Bangs works:

***

From Alice in Blunderland:

***

"The Station?" cried Alice. "What Station?"

But before the Hatter could answer, Alice, glancing through the window, caught sight of a very beautiful train standing before the veranda, and in a moment she found herself stepping on board with her friends, while a soft-spoken guard at the door was handing her an engraved card upon a silver salver "Respectfully Inviting Miss Alice to Step Lively There."

***

From Jack and the Check-Book:

***

"H'm!" said the squeaky little voice. "It is rather less than I had thought. However, we can fix that without much trouble. Zeros are cheap. Just add six of them to that balance."

"Do you mean add or affix?" asked Jack.

"Affix is what I should have said," replied the squeaky little voice.

***

From Half-hours with Jimmieboy:

***

So wide awake was he, indeed, that the small bed in which he had passed the night was not broad enough by some ten or twelve feet to accommodate the breadth of his wakefulness

***

From The Worsted Man:

***

[following one of the songs in the piece]

"But what is your scheme, Impatience? You cannot charm us with a song, you know, even if we have joined in the chorus."

***

From A Rebellious Heroine:

***

“I’m not an idiot, my dear Dorothy.”

“You are a heroine, love,” returned Mrs. Willard.

“Perhaps—but I am the kind of heroine who would stop a play five minutes after the curtain had risen on the first act if the remaining four acts depended on her failing to see something that was plain to the veriest dolt in the audience,” Marguerite replied, with spirit.

***

“Miss Andrews,” said Willard, “may I have the pleasure of presenting Count Bonetti?”

The Count’s head nearly collided with his toes in the bow that he made.

“Mr. Willard,” returned Miss Andrews, coldly, ignoring the Count, “feeling as I do that Count Bonetti is merely a bogus Count with acquisitive instincts, brought here, like myself, for literary purposes of which I cannot approve, I must reply to your question that you may not have that pleasure.”

With which remark... Miss Marguerite Andrews swept proudly from the room, ordered her carriage, and went home, thereby utterly ruining the second story of her life that I had undertaken to write.

***

“I am perfectly well aware, Mr. Parker, what we are down for, and I suppose I cannot blame you for your persistence.  Perhaps you don’t know any better; perhaps you do know better, but are willing to give yourself over unreservedly into the hands of another; perhaps you are being forced and cannot help yourself.  It is just possible that you are a professional hero, and feel under obligations to your employer to follow out his wishes to the letter.  However it may be, you have twice essayed to come to the point, and I have twice tried to turn you aside.  Now it is time to speak truthfully.  I admire and like you very much, but I have a will of my own, am nobody’s puppet, and if Stuart Harley [the author of the book within the book] never writes another book in his life, he shall not marry me to a man I do not love; and, frankly, I do not love you.  I do not know if you are aware of the fact, but it is true nevertheless that you are the third fiancé he has tried to thrust upon me since July 3d.”

***

“And that hero—from the Brooklyn dry-goods shop?” I asked, with a smile.

“I’d like to see him so much as—tell her the price of anything,” cried Harley.  “A man like that has no business to live in the same hemisphere with a woman like Marguerite Andrews.  When I threatened her with him I was conversing through a large and elegant though wholly invisible hat.”