Some of you who are my age may remember the British model who was known as Twiggy. She was remembered for being painfully thin and for her abnormally large eyes. She later had an acting career.
What you may not know is that in 2019 she was appointed a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. Thus she is now Dame Lesley Lawson, OBE. Below her picture is a link to a video of her receiving the honor from Prince Charles.
It is a characteristic of women as a sex, and one that does credit to their gentle hearts, that - unless they are gangsters' molls or something of that kind - they shrink from the thought of violence. Even when love is dead, they dislike the idea of the man to whom they were once bethrothed receiving a series of juicy ones from a horsewhip in the competent hands of an elderly, but still muscular, chief constable of a county. When they hear such a chief constable sketching out plas for an operation of this nature, their instinct is to hurry to the prospective victim's residence and warn him of his peril by outlining the shape of things to come.
(from Ring For Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"I suppose there really is nobody one could borrow a bit of cash from?"
"Nobody who springs immediately to the mind, m'lord."
"How about that financier fellow, who lives out Ditchingham way - Sir Somebody Something?"
"Sir Oscar Wopple, m'lord? He shot himself last Friday."
"Oh, then we won't bother him."
(from Ring For Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Did you notice him at dinner?"
"To which aspect of his demeanour during the meal does your lordship allude?"
"I was thinking of the sinister way he tucked into the roast duck. He flung himself on it like a tiger on its prey. He gave me the impression of a man without ruth or pity."
(From Ring For Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse. We seldom see the word "ruth" used in American English. Almost always it is attached to "-less" to indicate an absence of the quality.)
Louis L'Amour has said that many cowboys just were not interested in doing any work that could not be done from a horse's back, and I can somewhat understand their feelings. Cowboy boots, as has been said many times, are admirably suited to the cowboy's work. The pointed toe allows the boot to slip into the stirrup smoothly, and the high heel prevents the foot from sliding too far forward and helps to keep the cowboy from being thrown if his horse bucks or makes sudden turns.
On the other side of the ledger, cowboy boots are just about useless for any other type of work. You certainly can't run in them. The high heels are going to give you lower back problems if you have to stand in them all day. The long, pointed toes are a trip hazard. Great for what they were designed to do, but not of much use elsewhere. So why not stay where your boots were designed to be used? I can understand that.
"But I must have the money, and I must have it before noon tomorrow." His voice rose in what in a lesser man would have been a wail. "Listen. I'll have to let you in on something that's vitally secret, and if you breathe a word to a soul I'll rip you both asunder with my bare hands, shred you up into small pieces and jump on the remains with hobnailed boots. It that understood?"
Bill considered. "Yes, that seems pretty clear. Eh, Jeeves?"
"Most straightforward, m'lord."
"Carry on, Captain."
(from Ring For Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
It was a night made for romance, and Mrs. Spottsworth recognized it as such. Although in her vers libre days in Greenwich Village she had gone in almost exclusively for starkness and squalor, even then she had been at heart a sentimentalist. Left to herself, she would have turned out stuff full of moons, Junes, loves, doves, blisses and kisses. It was simply that the editors of the poetry magazines seemed to prefer rat-ridden tenements, the smell of cooking cabbage, and despair, and a girl had to eat.
(from Ring For Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
As she passed through the great gates of Rowcester Abbey and made her way up the long drive, it was beginning to seem to her that she might do considerably worse than cultivate Captain Biggar. A woman needs a protector, and what better protector can she find than a man who thinks nothing o going into tall grass after a wounded lion? True, wounded lions do not enter largely into the ordinary married life, but it is nice for a wife to know that if one does happen to come along, she can leave it with every confidence to her husband to handle.
(from Ring For Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"And of course the great thing is to gt the young blighter safely married and settled down, thus avoiding the risk of his coming in one day and laying on the mat something with a platinum head and an Oxford accent which he picked up on the pier at Blackpool. You remember what a pushover he always was for the gentle sex."
"I haven't seen Pongo since we were kids."
"Even then he was litting rom flower to flower like a willowy butterfly. He was the Don Juan of his dancing class when he wore Little Lord Fauntleroy suits, his heart an open door with 'Welcome' on the mat."
(from Uncle Dynamite, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
He could feel it coming now, the dry mouth, the sick, empty feeling in the belly. This time it would be for keeps. One of them would die. Charlie Gant was like a mad dog that would bite and tar at anything in his lust to destroy. Take a brave man every time, Zeb thought - I'd fear a brave man less than a coward. The coward has no scruples.
(from How the West Was Won, by Louis L'Amour)
The wind off the snow-covered peaks was cold. He added sticks to the fire. The older man had gone off in the shadows and bedded down for the night. He was no fool. Whatever happened, he was going to be out of it - more than likely that was how he came to be so old.
(from How the West Was Won, by Louis L'Amour)
The Indian way was to fight a great battle - one battle - and on the outcome would the decision rest. Not until the white man came did the Indian discover what a campaign meant. The Indian fought, then retired to his lodge; but the white man followed after, destroyed the Indian's corn, his meat, and his lodge.
(from How the West Was Won, by Louis L'Amour)
I figure actors are glad to take their money and run, regardless of the characters they have to portray. And I have heard that many of them actually prefer to play unsavory parts because they are a challenge. But I would hate to have had to portray "slimy" characters. It is one thing to be a bad guy whom everyone boos, and something else again to play someone that no one would touch with a ten-foot pole.
Ironically, actor Howard McNear (Floyd the Barber on the Andy Griffith Show) was a lovable sort on the TV program, but very often, because of his unique voice, played sleazy sorts on old radio programs, where he was one of the busiest of actors.
"Lil, have you seen, really seen San Fransisco? It's ugly and small and full of fleas, and it burns down every five minutes, but each time they rebuild it gets bigger and finer.
(from How the West Was Won, by Louis L'Amour)
So simple a thing, a lighted fire, yet it was a symbol of man's first great step toward civilization, and it was his instinctive return to reality when times of trouble came. It is his first reaction, to build a fire, to give himself the security and comfort that a fire symbolizes.
(from How the West Was Won, by Louis L'Amour)
There were those, of course, who scoffed at Indian attacks and who did not fear, who believed death was something that happened to others, and not to them. They had not yet discovered the impartiality of death.
(from How the West Was Won, by Louis L'Amour)
That would be Brutus at the oar. He was the stalwart one, the stable one. Never excited, never disturbed, when trouble or danger came he simply bowed his head and pushed on, as his sort will always push on, to their last day.
When others panic or shout, when they wail and shed bitter tears, decrying the changing times, there are those like Brutus who simply go on. Changing times, anger, disappointment, defeat - all these they take in stride, living their lives with quiet persistence.
(from How the West Was Won, by Louis L'Amour)
Old Mr. Howard Saxby was seated at his desk in his room at the Edgar Saxby Literary Agency when Cosmo arrived there. He was knitting a sock. He knitted a good deal, he would tell you if you asked him, to keep hiself from smoking, adding that he also smoked a good deal to keep himself from knitting. He was a long, thin gentleman in his middle seventies with a faraway, unseeing look in his eye, not unlike that which a dead halibut on a fishmonger's slab gives the pedestrian as he passes.
(from Cocktail Time by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Do you realize that every single discreditable episode in my past is filed away in Nannie's memory? She could and would tell Bunny things about me which in time would be bound to sap her love. How long could a wife go on looking on her husband as a king among men after hearing an eyewitness's account of his getting jerked before a tribunal and fined thee weeks' pocket money for throwing rocks at the kitchen window or a blow-by-blow description of the time he was sick at his birthday party through eating too much almond cake? In about two ticks I should sink to the level of a fifth-rate power."
(from Cocktail Time, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Phoebe, poor lost soul, has a way of putting her head on one side like a canary and saying, 'What, dear?' when spoken to, which must be very annoying to a man accustomed to having one and all hang upon his lightest word. It is when she has done this some six or seven times in the course of a breakfast or luncheon that, according to Peasemarch, he shoots up to the ceiling in a sheet of flame and starts setting about her regardless of her age or sex. Yes, I can see his side of the thing, but it must be very bad for his blood pressure and far from pleasant for all concerned. Peasemarch says it wrings his heart to listen with his ear to the keyhole. You don't know Bert Peasemarch, do you?"
"No."
"Splended chap. About as much brain as you could put comfortably into an aspirin bottle, but what are brains if the heart be of gold?"
(from Cocktail Time, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Sir Raymond had never been fond of the modern young man, considering him idiotic, sloppy, disrespectful, inefficient and, generally speaking, a blot on the London scene, and this Brazil nut sequence put, if one may so express it, the lid on his distaste. It solidified the view he had always held that steps ought to be taken about the modern young man and taken promptly. What steps, he could not at the moment suggest, but if, say, something on the order of the Black Death were shortly to start setting about these young pests and giving them what was coming to them, it would have his full approval. He would hold its coat and cheer it on.
(from Cocktail Time, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"I would advise your lordship to assume a nonchalant air and disclaim all knowledge of the matter."
"With a light laugh, you mean?"
"Precisely, m'lord."
Bill tried a light laugh. "How did that sound, Jeeves?"
"Barely adequate, m'lord."
"More like a death rattle?"
"Yes, m'lord."
"I shall need a few rehearsals."
"Several, m'lord. It will be essential to carry conviction."
Bill kicked petulantly at a footstool. "How do you expect me to carry conviction, feeling the way I do?"
"I can readily appreciate that your lordship is disturbed."
"I'm all of a twitter. Have you ever seen a jelly hit by a cyclone?"
"No, m'lord. I have never been present on such an occasion."
"It quivers. So do I."
(from Ring For Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Why we leavin' so early, Pa?" Linus asked.
"We've a long way to go, Linus, but we're making the best trip a man can ever make."
"How's that?"
"Why we're going home? When you've lived without one as long as I have, son, you'll know what music there is in the word."
(from How the West Was Won, by Louis L'Amour)
"You know, Pongo, the whole trouble in this world is the way fellows deteriorate as they grow older. Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all their finer qualities away, with the result that the frightfully good chap of twenty-five is changed little by little into the stinker of fifty. Yes, yes, I know what you are going to say. 'Absurd,' you are about to protest. 'Look at you, Uncle Fred. Every day in every way you have got better and better. A saintly boy, you have grown into a saintly senior, revered and respected by all, and the brain reels at the thought of the heights you will reach when you are eighty.' Quite true, but I am a rare exception."
(from Cocktail Time, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
