"Such brats - oh, dear me, such brats! Shall I confess it, Mr. Harkright? - I sadly want a reform of the construction of children. Nature's only idea eems to be to make them machines for the production of incessant noise."
(from The Woman In White, by William Wilkie Collins)
Upon the whole, he had a frail, languidly-fretful, over-refined look - something singularly and upleasantly delicate in its association with a man, and, at the same time, something which could by no possibility have looked natural and appropriate if it had been transferred to the personal appearance of a woman. My morning's experience of Miss Halcombe had predisposed me to be pleased with everybody in the house, but my sympathies shut themselves up resolutely at the first sight of Mr. Fairlie.
(from The Woman in White, by William Wilkie Collins)
Mr. Fairlie is too great an invalid to be a compaion for anybody. I don't know what is the matter with him, and the doctors don't know what is the matter with him, and he doesn't know himself what is the matter with him. We all say it's on the nerves, and we none of us know what we mean when we say it.
(from The Woman in White, by William Wilkie Collins)
Her expression - bright, frank, and intelligent - appeared, while she was silent, to be altogether wanting in those feminine attractions of gentleness and pliability, without which the beauty of the handsomest woman alive is beauty incomplete. To see such a face as this set on shoulders that a sculptor would have longed to model - to be charmed by the modest graces of action through which the symmetrical limbs betrayed their beauty when they moved, and then to be almost repelled by the masculine form and masculine look of the features in which the perfectly-shaped figure ended - was to feel a sensation oddly kin to the helpless discomfort familiar to us all in sleep, when we recognise yet cannot reconcile the anomalies and contradictions of a dream
(from The Woman in White, by William Wilkie Collins)
The fine house, my good dears, has got inside it a fine family. A Mamma, fair and fat; and a Papa, the fairest and the fattest of all, who is a mighty merchant, up to his eyes in gold - a fine man once, but seeing that he has got a naked head and two chins, fine no longer at the present time.
(from The Woman In White, by William Wilkie Collins)
I have always held the old-fashioned opinion that the primary object of a work of fiction should be to tell a story; and I have never believed that the novelist who properly performed this first condition of his art was in danger, on that account, of neglecting the delineation of character - for this plain reason, that the effect produced by any narrative of events is essentially dependent, not on the events themselves, but on the human interest which is directly connected with them. It may be possible, in novel-writing, to present characters successfully without telling a story; but it is not possible to tell a story successfully without presenting characters: their existence, as recognisable realities, being the sole condition on which the story can be effectively told. The only narrative which can hope to lay a strong hold on the attention of readers is a narrative which interests them about men and women - for the perfectly-obvious reason that they are men and women themselves.
(William Wilkie Collins, from the Preface to the 1861 Edition of The Woman in White)
There was another silence, this time distinctly awkward. It had always been a bone of contention between them that Ellery was stubbornly uncommunicative until the very denouement of a case. Neither pleas nor wild horses could drag a single explanatory word out of him until he was mentally satisfied that he had built up a flawless and impenetrable argument. So there was really no point in asking questions.
(from The Chinese Orange Mystery, by Ellery Queen)
He delved among the miscellaneous objects from the bag and fished out a torn, worn, coverless book. It looked as if it had been used as ammunition in a major conflict.
"Not a Bible. Ordinary cheap little breviary," he muttered. "Hmm. And those pamphlets - ah, religious tracts! We seem to have stuck a very godly old gentleman, dad."
"Godly old gentlemen rarely get themselves bumped off," said the Inspector dryly.
(from The Chinese Orange Mystery, by Ellery Queen)
They waited for what seemed to Ellery, at least, an eternity.
He kept shifting his attention from the fidgety boy in blue to one of the four huge gilded clocks above the information booth. The minutes sucked by lazily. He had never realized before how long a minute could be; how long and empty and nerve-racking.
The Inspector watched without change of expression. He was accustomed to these interludes and from years of experience had developed a patience with anticipated events which was, to Ellery, little short of marvelous.
(from The Chinese Orange Mystery, by Ellery Queen)
The Inspector slammed the receiver and yelled: "Ready?"
"For the love of Peter," panted Ellery from the bedroom, "what d'ye think I am - a fireman? What is this, anyway?" He appeared in the living-room doorway in unlaced shoes, trousers with hanging suspenders, unbottoned shirt, necktie in hand. Djuna gaped from the kitchen.
"Grab your hat and coat and finish dressing in the cab!" shouted the Inspector, yanking Ellery toward the foyer. "Come on!" And he dived through the door.
Ellery made a strangled sound and scrambled after, the tongues of his oxfords flapping dismally.
"But the oofs?" moaned Djuna.
There was no answer except the thunder of feet running down the stairs.
(from The Chinese Orange Mystery, by Ellery Queen)
Ellery drawled: "Care to talk?"
The young man force a grin. "Curiously enough, I'm not in a conversational mood at the moment."
"Curiously enogh, I am. Peaceful atmosphere, two intelligent young men alone, smoking - perfect background for small talk, Kirk. I've always said - a most original and observation, of course - that what the American needs is not so much a good five-cent cigar as the civilizing inluence of inconsequential conversation. Don't you want to be civilized, you heathen?"
(from The Chinese Orange Mystery, by Ellery Queen)
