unearths some literary gems.
“Whenever I happen to be alone for a meal, my book is Vanity Fair, and the parts I pick out to reread are lunchy and dinnery. There’s a smear of tomato sauce over Becky casting the Dixonary into the garden, and gravy on, ‘And eh, Amelia my dear, I’ve brought in a pine for tiffin.’”
***
The piano has one note which is dumb....
I’m going (blank)
To dreamy Hono (blank) lu!
Katrine and Sheil and I always sing “blank” now instead of the word or syllable when we practise the ensembles at home.
***
"Is [Charlotte Brontë] alive still?"
"No."
"I thought perhaps she might be one of those sort of writers—like Thomas Hardy—who sounded as if they ought to be dead before they really were."
***
"Why, you unmitigated limb!" [said affectionately]
**
Only one of the comedians had the heart to comeed at such an hour.
***
Katrine’s company is playing at the Hammersmith Palace, and she has to have a terrible, sexless meal that’s too old to be tea and too young to be dinner at about five-thirty.
***
“But, we’ve only Deirdre’s word for it that those were the desiderata,” responded Sir Herbert caustically.
“The what, Toddy?”
Sheil cocked her head. “You do know such uncommon words.”
“I mean, my dear, the objects required.”
“Well, I like the thing you said before, best. Anybody can require objects.”
***
I often think that perhaps there is only a limited amount of memory going about the world, and that when it wants to live again, it steals its nest, like a cuckoo.
***
[The protagonists are just making this all up in real time, the Brontes being among their collective imaginary friends.]
"Any news of the Brontes?"
"Rather. Emily's writing a new book called Swithering Depths."
"Oh my lord! That woman!"
"And it's coming out in the spring. Entwhistle, Lassiter, and Morhead."
[...]
"Just say it again. I must memorise it."
We chanted, "Entwhistle--Lassiter--and Morhead."
"I like Lassiter," decided Lady Toddington, "he's the brains of that firm. We'll have him to dinner."
***
"She's got the sort of face that used to go with being called Gladys, mother says."
***
BONUSES:
"a French Count called Isidore (de la So-and-so, de la Something Else)"
the "eleventh second" instead of "eleventh hour"
"infinite whimsical wisdom"
At the end of this reprint edition of this tale of an eccentric family (three adults and one child) and their imaginary friends is an ad for another reprint by a different author--this one about two adults whose entirely out-of-whole-cloth imaginary friend comes to life. I never realized that comic fiction about grown-ups' encounters with imaginary friends was a mid-20th-c. subgenre! (They also advertise their reprint of Miss Buncle--and Miss Buncle's relationship to the roman à clef she's written involves some blending and confusion, in her own mind, vis-a-vis the real versus imaginary versions of her world.)
