unearths some literary gems.
***
“Than bring a bottle of the Old and Crusted,” and Mr. Mitcham gives such richness to his vowel sounds that already the wine seems twice as old and crusted as it was before…. After almost chasing the waiter out of the room with his eyebrows, Mr. Mitcham sits down with the air of a man who not only knows a good wine but also knows how to order a good wine.
***
Even such people as printers and costumers had to be “wired” too; and all these wires promptly produced other wires, some of them so compressed that they might as well have been in cipher, and others of a staggering length and fluency, like strange heads coming round the door and screaming at the top of their voices at her.
***
["It's Risqué Only in Retrospect" dept.]
Miss Thong has a part in the homely epic; it is a very tiny part—no more than that of a whispering ghost—but we cannot say it has no significance.
[Later]
“I thought I was going to be lost and then they’d have to put a notice up: ‘Lost—Miss Thong. Finder Rewarded.’”
***
But she did not stay for the performance in the evening…. She insisted upon returning, as she had planned, by the 5:35, and said so a good many times, for somehow it sounded like a train that a strong-minded woman would catch.
***
Becoming more mysteriously West Riding in his turn of phrase with every added insult, [he] would conclude by muttering that Mr. Jerningham “wer war ner a pike sheep heead,” which final and awful judgment was not the less devastating because nobody understood what it meant.
***
In Bruddersford you are always on the lookout for swelled heads, and if a man does anything at all out of the ordinary there, his head has to be measured at once.
***
“Let the word go round, and song and cheer be all our what’s its name.”
[Later]
“Let joy and what’s-its-name be unconfined.”
