From The Bandbox, by Louis Joseph Vance:

***

“Mr. Iff. W. H. Iff, Whiff: sometimes so-called: merry wheeze based on my typographical make-up; once a joke, now so grey with age I generally pull it myself, thus saving new acquaintances the mental strain. Practical philanthropy—what?”

“Indeed?”

“Believe me. You’ve no notion how folks suffer in the first throes of that giddy pun. And then when it falls flat—naturally I can’t laugh like a fool at it any longer—blooie!” said Mr. Iff with expression—“like that—blooie!—they do feel so cheap. Wherefore I maintain I do humanity a service when I beat it to that moth-eaten joke. You follow me?”

***

In Act I (Time: the Present) he saw himself bearding the telephone in its lair—that is, in the darkest and least accessible recess of the ground-floor hallway. In firm, manful accents, befitting an intrepid soul, he details a number to the central operator—and meekly submits to an acidulated correction of his Amurrikin accent.

***

“I ain’t sure, sir, as she did nime the lidy, but if she did, it was somethin’ like Burnside, I fancy—or else Postlethwayt.”

***

His conclusions may be summed up under two heads: (a) there wasn’t any answer; (b) it was all an unmitigated nuisance.

***

a short, stout, sedulously hilarious gentleman who oozed public-spirited geniality at every pore and insisted on buttonholing inoffensive strangers and demanding that they enter an embryonic deck-quoit tournament—in short, discovering every known symptom of being the Life and Soul of the Ship

***

Her passion for bromidioms always stupefied Staff.

***

Mrs. Ilkington’s manner implied that he was a bold, bad butterfly, but that she had his entomological number, none the less.

***

“R’ally!” she cried, and tapped his arm playfully. “You are as stupid as most brilliant men!”

***

“I quite understand; I keep a temperament of my own."

***

“Genius frequently needs a lift but is more often to be found in an apartment without one."

***

[Audible italics are getting to be old hat* to me, but I haven't yet tired of audible capital letters.]

“But—I fail to see the joke.”

“And will, until I tell you All.”

Her tone supplied the capital letter.

[*Incidentally, this dialogue occurs in a conversation about a hat.]

***

He was standing in the doorway to the [protagonist's] bedroom, looking much like an exceptionally cruel caricature of [the protagonist].

***

"I add up the bandbox and the razor and multiply the sum by the fact that the average woman will smuggle as quick as the average man will take a drink; and I’m Jeremiah Wise, Esquire.”

***

Mrs. Ilkington bore down upon them in full regalia of sensation.

***

[Qualified Things dept.]

He didn’t believe for an instant that she had meant to run away with the Cadogan collar; and he hoped fervently that she hadn’t been involved in any serious trouble by the qualified thing.

[That "qualified" is a blank map to maledicta, yes?"]