From Mr. Pinkerton Grows a Beard, by David Frome:

***

He made a sharp turn to the right and went rapidly along until he came to the Swedenborgian Reading Room. He opened the door, put on an air that he felt might be supposed to be Swedenborgian, nodded to the middle-aged man in charge, and settled down at a reading table.

***

In the rear of the flat he could hear Mr. Gwatley-Wells singing loudly about an old spinning wheel, accompanying a hand organ playing down in the road below. Now and then as the organist's arm wearied Mr. Gwatley-Wells would get ahead, and would hold the note powerfully until the music caught up with him.

[That's just what I would do!]

***

"I trust Mr. Gwatley-Wells has not got himself into any unusual difficulty?"

Not knowing the nature of Mr. Gwatley-Wells's normal difficulties, Bull shook his head.

***

[The protagonist and another character have been joking about whether she'll "compromise" him if they're seen alone together in a hotel restaurant.]

They went in the hotel and sat down in a corner in the dining room between two large gilt-framed pier glasses set at right angles.

Molly Cameron looked in them and smiled. "That makes so many of us that it must be all right," she said.

***