unearths some literary gems.
***
"Then let me give you a word of advice," said the older man, smiling so flat a smile that his clipped grey moustache stood out like a hedgehog's back.
***
Down the same steps came Beamish, a much younger man, tall and loose-limbed, in appearance rather like a hock-bottle with a fancy cork stopper.
***
"Thanks, I'd love to," said Beamish, standing like an umbrella in his long M.A. gown.
***
And here was John Beamish stalking down the road like a split niblick.
***
"I'm a convinced Freudian, and I shall expose all your horrid complexes."
"Not until after the claret," said Stubbs firmly.
***
"Well, that was simple enough!" he said aloud in great surprise, as he stuck the letter up on the bureau and looked at it as something portentous--as if he had laid an egg." [SPOILER: We are in for a LOT of unexpected egg references.]
***
Next morning he went up to school with the letter in his pocket, fingering it now and then as if afraid it was not licked up tightly enough to keep his decision in.
***
"There's a strange pleasure in doing the same thing at the same time year after year."
"Makes you feel like a heavenly body, I suppose?"
***
"He used to say to my mother: 'You know, Mrs. Egg'--Egg was my mother's married name, and I was a Miss Egg when I first met Adam...."
***
dressed in a grey flannel suit with architectural shoulders
***
"Take him to see Two Geese and a Gander by Dmitir Popoff." [Implied eggs here? And will the show lay an egg?]
***
So here he was in his own flat, quite alone except for the egg-shaped bust in steel--"Stainless Stephen" he called it to himself.
***
Stubbs began to have something of a fellow-feeling for the steel egg, almost as if he had really laid it himself.
***
Perhaps this little qualm was due to the fact that his beard was not yet one thing or the other?
***
The programme, Stubbs noted, was to consist of two parts: no fewer than thirty emotional attitudes by Mrs. Darker herself, followed after an interval for refreshments by a reading by Miss Claribel Blockhouse from her own poem-states. At the end of all, Stubbs noted the ominous word "Discussion."
***
He was not at all sure whether, without the help of the programme, he could have distinguished No. 2, "Emotions on seeing a Sunflower," from No. 8, "Meditation before Marriage"; or No. 6, "Trapped!" from No. 21, "Surprise on finding a Pearl."
***
"Could you have guessed which was Meditation before Marriage and which was Cauliflowers in Moonlight?"
***
"What a mind! What insight into the inwardness of words!"
***
If there was going to be a baby it might be wiser to put Stainless Stephen into the cupboard: you never knew what influence things had on women in that condition; and how awful to have a Stainless baby!
***
[The "object-poems" in this novel are essentially Joseph Cornell-style boxes. The first one we encounter includes--of course--a plaster-of-Paris egg; and the first of Stubbs's own object-poems includes an egg spoon. Later on, Stubbs destroys his object-poems.]
Fed by relays of object-poems the fire was now burning fiercely.
***
[The Danish housekeeper alludes to Stainless Stephen.]
"Vere is the schentlemann?....The silver schentlemann from the sitting-room?"
***
"Qui'-ow-ri', Mr. Studs, thank you."
"Stubbs. With a B. Two B's in fact."
***
Bonuses (Silly Surnames dept.):
Stockington-Poker
Miss Feathers and Miss Cynthia Feathers
the Reverend Peter Picton-Sawbridge
a family called the Upshotts
