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unearths some literary gems.
From Rich Relatives, by Compton Mackenzie:
***The restless alchemy of nature had set to work to change the essences of the container and the contents, so that the sandwiches tasted more like cardboard and the cardboard felt more like sandwiches***"He only intended to do a short history of England before the Norman Conquest, but the more he goes on, the further he goes back."***Mrs. Lightbody's suggestions, ghostly and practical, clung for a moment to a drain-pipe***"Perhaps we could get one out and look at it in the train.""Hadn't we better wait until I come and call?" he suggested. "It's not fair to look at things in the train. Trains wobble so, don't they?"***Inasmuch as she changed her clothes three times a day, went to bed at night, got up in the morning, and in fact behaved as a woman of flesh and blood does behave, it was obvious that she and her clothes were not really one and indivisible. Yet so solid and coherent were they that if one of her dresses had hurried downstairs after her to say that she had put on the wrong one, it might not have surprised an onlooker with any effect of strangeness.***It was easy, or difficult, to choose for presentation one of Sholto Grant's pictures, because in subject and treatment they were all much alike. In every foreground there was a peasant girl among olive trees, in every middle distance olive groves, and in every background the rocks and sea of Sirene. The choice resolved itself into whether you wanted a bunch of anemones, a bunch of poppies, an armful of broom, or a basket of cherries; it was really more like shopping at a greengrocer's than choosing a picture. In the end Jasmine, who by now was herself beginning to feel hungry, chose fruit rather than flowers, and went downstairs with a four-foot square canvas.***On an impulse to defeat misgiving she jumped out of bed, sent up the blind with a jerk that admitted Monday morning to her room like a jack-in-the-box....***"And what is the programme for to-day?" asked Sir Hector suddenly, flinging down the paper with such a crackle that Jasmine would not have been more startled if like a clown he had jumped clean through it into the conversation.***Jasmine's little talk with her uncle was the smallest ever known.***There are few places in this world that cast a more profound gloom upon the human spirit than a sunny English drawing-room at 9.45 a.m. Its welcome is as frigid as a woman who fends off a kiss because she has just made up her lips.***[A used typewriter is acquired.]Cousin Edith...used to play upon it ghostly sonatas, occasionally by mistake pressing too hard upon one of the stops and uttering a rudimentary scream of affright when she beheld an ambiguous letter take shape upon the paper.[...]Gradually Jasmine mastered some of the whims of the instrument; she learnt, for instance, that if one wanted a capital A, the birth of a capital A had to be helped by pressing down S at the same time; she also learnt to control the self-assertiveness of the Z, which used to butt in at the least excuse as if for years it had resented the infrequency of its employment.***Lady Grant had chosen a small table in the window, one of those small tables with such a large vase of flowers in the middle that the feeder is left with the impression that he is eating off the rim of a flower-pot.***"Funny that those lines should come so pat. I don't usually spout poetry, you know." [The protagonist of Slightly Perfect, which I was reading concurrently, also spouts some poetry at one point and then claims he doesn't usually do so.]***Nor did the coachman look like a proper coachman, because he had a moustache, which somehow made the cockade in his hat look like a moustache too.***Every time the rays of a passing lamp splashed the brougham Jasmine felt that she ought to say something, but before she had time to think of anything to say it was dark again; and the next splash of light always came as a surprise, so that in the end she gave up trying to think of anything to say and counted the lamp-posts instead. Driving in a brougham with Aunt Cuckoo reminded her of playing hide-and-seek in a wardrobe, when, although one was delighted to have found a good place in which to hide, one hoped that the searchers would not be long in finding it out.***"But it's just like our own risotto," she exclaimed when the heap of well-greased rice sown with morsels of meat was put before her."Very likely," said Aunt Cuckoo, and the tone in which she accepted Jasmine's comparison was so remote and vague that if Jasmine had likened the pilau to anything in the scale of edibility between Chinese birds' nests and ordinary bread and butter, she would probably have assented with the same toneless equanimity.***at the third time of hearing [a character's repertoire of travel anecdotes] one became as it were mentally saddle-sore and yearned to be back home.***Aunt Cuckoo's voice, from many years of tonelessness, was, now that she was able to feel a genuine excitement, full of astonishing little squeaks and tremolos which had she been a clock would have led the listener to oil the works at once.***The most rapid, the most inattentive glance at these pictures was enough to produce a sense of almost intolerable fatigue, because each picture was so obviously what it set out to be that the eye was not allowed a blink between a Sussex down, a Devonshire harbour, a Dorset pasture, and a London slum, and the amount of narrative compressed into the space was as if a dozen bad novelists had simultaneously read a dozen of their worst chapters.***[Times as Smells dept.]the rooms on the ground floor smelt perpetually of half-past-two on Sunday afternoon, partly of clean linen, partly of gravy.***As for Harry Vibart, it was absurd to go on thinking of him. She might as well fall in love with a jack-in-the-box. [The second metaphorical jack-in-the-b. that has unexpectedly popped up, for those keeping count.]***But it was no fun to lecture one's involuntary self unless it were done viva voce.***Seated at a large table at the far end of the room was her uncle, or rather what she supposed to be her uncle, for her first impression was that somebody had left a large ostrich egg on the table."Jasmine," her aunt announced.The ostrich egg remained motionless; but the scratching of a pen and the slow regular movement of a very plump white hand across a double sheet of foolscap indicated that the room contained human life. At the end of a minute the egg lifted itself from the table, and Jasmine found herself confronted by a very bright pair of eyes and offered that very plump white hand.***"Never let a bishop be sure of anything. He thrives on ambiguity."***"I work quite hard at typewriting, and this is a very good machine. The only thing is that it won't do dipthongs, which is a pity, because Uncle Arnold gets very angry if Saxon names are not spelt with dipthongs. There are six cousins here who are called after the six boy kings. Uncle Arnold calls them Eadward, Eadmund, Eadgar, Eadwig, Ædred and Æthelred; but other people call them Eddy, Monday, Tuesday, Why, Because, and Ethel."***Like most people who keep journals, he was usually a day or two in arrears, and when people saw him pompously entering the room with a notebook under his arm, they used to hasten anywhere to escape being asked what he had done on Thursday morning between eleven and one.***Unfortunately for Edward's plans he found that Jasmine was inclined to laugh at him when in the middle of rehearsing a dialogue from the Italian Traveller's Vade Mecum between himself and a laundress he indulged in Petrarchan apostrophes.***"Confound this patent lighter; it's gone out."The upper room of the tower was in complete darkness, and Jasmine was inclined to hope that it would remain in darkness; she felt that even the mild illumination of the cigar-lighter gave too intimate a revelation of her countenance for any promise to be made. Harry was gaining time for his reply by devoting himself to the cigar-lighter, and Jasmine felt that if this tension was continued, she should presently begin to emit white sparks herself.[That's two disparaged patent lighters in the last two books I've read--the other one, again, being Slight Perfect--for those doing the math. (This lighter is actually present in the scene, I note, where the other was introduced gratuitously as a metaphor.) My reading choices, sometimes separated by decades and/or an ocean, seem to crosspollinating a lot lately! Well, it's true I do sometimes leave the books lying around in proximity to each other. Maybe I should embark on a branch of literary critcism that consists of reading two unrelated books concurrently and looking for random mirrorings. Then again, it's probably been done!]***[Speaking of lit crit: Who says literary criticism isn't an exact science? The formula here seems to hinge on an inverse relationship between quality and the number of appearances of the word "darling" per page.]"But do you realize that you've driven me into reading books? That's a pretty desperate state of affairs. I can't pass a railway book-stall now without buying armfuls of the most atrocious rot. And the worse it is, the more I enjoy it. About fifty darlings a page is my style now."***[Bonus: Mackenzie casually uses the word "bosky," thus defying Gelett Burgess--who, as you may recall, was quoted in a recent batch of snippets as saying, 'As for "Welkin," "Lush," and "Bosky"--who dares to lead their metric feet into the prim paths of prose? Let bygones be bygones.' In other words, the answer to Gelett's rhetorical question, half a decade after it was posed, was "Compton Mackenzie."]
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