From The Man from Scotland Yard, by David Frome:

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Everyone always knew—to his great relief—what Archie meant after the first three words. Thus he never had to bother about knowing what he meant himself. Schoolmasters were the only people who had never seemed to know. Waiters to Archie's mind were much more intelligent. He'd had doubts about train people since his first long vacation when he was up at Oxford. A man sold him a ticket to northern Italy. He'd wanted to go to Iceland. Not that it made any difference to Archie, except that he met Aunt Gertrude in Florence and had to look at pictures in galleries.

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His eyes were lost in the concentric depths of his glasses.

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There was loud and insistent clamouring in the wings of the stage where Mr. Arthurington trod the boards in the latest song and dance hit called Life. It seems hardly fair that the actors in any given rôle in the universal tragi-comedy are never allowed to see the book with their parts clearly down in black and white. They simply have to blunder on and off, getting their cues as they may. They are not permitted to put in lines of their own when they think the piece is falling flat, and they can never leave lines out, because the Prompter is always in the wings. The unfortunate part of it is that they never know who the Management is; thus there is no way of lodging a formal complaint.

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"How the devil's a fellow expected to sleep with you next door blowing and snorting like a sacred buffalo wallowing in the Andes?" ....

"You mean Ganges."

"It's the same thing when you're trying to sleep."

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Mr. Pinkerton was as familiar with Bull's habits as Nelson is with those of the lions in Trafalgar-square.

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"When does St. John get home, by the way?"

"Not before dinner. The Royal Society of something or other is meeting."

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"He's what a friend of mine calls a pillow of the Church."

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There was something uncanny in this apparently simple yet really intricate game of cat and mouse. In his rôle of cat he was threading a maze with the mouse holding the other end of the string. The mouse knew the ins and outs of this maze. Inspector Bull had the very uncomfortable feeling that while he was blindly feeling his way, the mouse had tied up his end of the strong to a post somewhere, and had simply gone home.

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