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unearths some literary gems.
From Our Mr. Wrenn, by Sinclair Lewis:
***The April skies glowed with benevolence this Saturday morning. The Metropolitan Tower was singing, bright ivory tipped with gold, uplifted and intensely glad of the morning. The buildings walling in Madison Square were jubilant; the honest red-brick fronts, radiant; the new marble, witty. The sparrows in the middle of Fifth Avenue were all talking at once, scandalously but cleverly.***“You’re the brother-in-law to a wise one,” commented the Brass-button Man.[This seems to be a compliment, meaning "you're smart to do that." But the only Google Books results for the phrase come from this very line in this very novel.]***A day of furtive darts out from his room to do London, which glumly declined to be done.***[Punctuation Marks Bearing the Full Burden dept.]“And how do you place Nietzsche?” she gravely desired to know.“?”“Nietzsche. You know—the German humorist.”***"I think I’ll go back to Paris. There even the Interesting People are—why, they’re interesting."***"There’s tea at five dollars a cup that they advertise is grown on ‘cloud-covered mountain-tops.’ I suppose when the tops aren’t cloud-covered they only charge three dollars a cup."***[Culteranismo dept.]"That’s playing. With words. My aged parent calls it ‘talking too much and not saying anything.’ Note that last—not saying anything! It’s one of the rules in playing that mustn’t be broken.”He understood that better than most of the things she said. “Why,” he exclaimed, “it’s kind of talking sideways.”***“And eat them without buttering your nose. For if you butter your nose they’ll think you’re a Greek professor. And you wouldn’t like that, would you, honey?”***He ate his dinner with a grave courtesy toward the food and the waiter. He was positively courtly to his fork.***Yet when dear Carson had jauntily departed, leaving the room still loud with the smack of his grin, Istra seemed to have forgotten that Mr. Wrenn was alive.***The Aengusmere Caravanserai is so unyieldingly cheerful and artistic that it makes the ordinary person long for a dingy old-fashioned room in which he can play solitaire and chew gum without being rebuked with exasperating patience by the wall stencils and clever etchings and polished brasses. It is adjectiferous. The common room (which is uncommon for [a] hotel parlor) is all in superlatives and chintzes.***"Now do tell us all about it, Mr. Wrenn. First, I want you to meet Miss Saxonby and Mr. Gutch and dear Yilyena Dourschetsky and Mr. Howard Bancock Binch—of course you know his poetry.”And then she drew a breath and flopped back into the wing-chair’s muffling depths.***“Gee! I talked to that omelet Berg’ rac like I’d known it all my life!”***Mrs. Arty—Mrs. R. T. Ferrard is her name, but we always call her Mrs. Arty.***The profusion of furniture was like a tumult; the redness and oakness and polishedness of furniture was a dizzying activity.***A general grunt that might be spelled “Hmmmmhm” assented.***"I’m getting sick of Paris and some day I’m going to stop an absinthe on the boulevard and slap its face to show I’m a sturdy moving-picture Western Amurrican."***Setting up his box stage, he glued a pill-box and a match-box on the floor—the side of the box it had always been till now—and there he had the mahogany desks. He thrust three matches into the corks, and behold three graceful actors—graceful for corks, at least.***"Where’s N? Oh, how clever of it, it’s right by M."***Besides, it wasn’t as if he were engaged to Nelly, or anything like that. Besides, of course Istra would never care for him. There were several other besideses with which he harrowed himself while trying to appear picnically agreeable.***
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