Concerning knitting

 No masculine eye can reckon up purls and plains and estimate the size of chest which the garment is destined to cover. Moreover, with amateur knitters there much always be allowed a margin for involuntary error. There were many cases during the war where our girls sent sweaters to their sweethearts which would have induced strangulation in their young brothers. The amateur sweater of those days was, in fact, practically tantamount to German propaganda.

(from "A Woman is Only a Woman," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Wagering on love

 So little was known of the form of the two men, neither having figured as principal in a love-affair before, that even money was the best you could get, and the market was sluggish. I think my own flutter of twelve golf balls, taken up by Percival Brown, was the most substantial of any of the wagers. I selected James as the winner. Why, I can hardly say, unless that he had an aunt who contributed occasional stories to the "Women's Sphere." These thing sometimes weigh with a girl. On the other hand, George Lucas, who had half-a-dozen of ginger-ale on Peter, based his calculations on the fact that James wore knickerbockers on the links, and that no girl could possibly love a man with calves like that. In short, you see, we really had nothing to go on.

(from "A Woman Is Only a Woman," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Nothing he can be proud of

    "Where you headed for, son?"

    "Riley McClean shrugged. "This is as good a place as any. I'm hunting a job."

    "What do you do?"

    "Most anything. It don't make no difference."

    Now when a man says that he can do most anything, it is a safe bet he can do nothing, or at least that he can do nothing well. If a man has a trade, he is proud of it and says so, and usually he will do a passing job of anything else he tackled.

(from "The One for the Mohave Kid," by Louis L'Amour)

Enough to make a preacher cuss

 Invariably, in the course of a man's struggle with a collar button it would slip from his fingers and roll into the most inaccessible place in the room. It was never possible to simply stoop down and pick up a collar button. One always had to get down on one's knees and reach under whatever piece of furniture was nearby and feel around for the missing object. It has been reliably reported that even ministers of the gospel used unseemly language on such occasions.

(from "McQueen of the Tumbling K," by Louis L'Amour)

She had already proposed

     He placed his hat carefully on the hook and sat down. He was suddenly tired. He ran his fingers through his crisp, dark hair. "Me?" he blinked his eyes and reached for the coffeepot. "I am going to shave and take a bath. Then I'm going to sleep for twenty hours about, and then I'm going to throw the leather on my horse and hit the trail."

    "I told you over there," Carol said quietly, "that I didn't want you to go."

    "Uh-uh. If I don't go now," he looked at her somberly, "I'd never want to go again."

    "Then don't go," she said.

    He didn't.

(from "The Man from Battle Flat," by Louis L'Amour)

Carpetbag courts

 In his short story, "Keep Travelin', Rider," Louis L'Amour refers to carpetbag courts, which were, of course, the legal system set up in the south after the War Between the States. We can assume that true justice for southerners was a vain hope in those days. One can only imagine what it was like living in the old south in those days.

A policeman's lot

 "I know you'll understand that in a case like this we have to fuss about and try to get as complete a picture as possible of the days, sometimes even the weeks and months, before the event. It generally turns out that ninety-nine percent of the information is quite useless and then everybody thinks how needlessly inquisitive and impertinent the police are. Sometimes, however, there is an apparently irrelevant detail that leads, perhaps by accident, to the truth."

(from Scales of Justice, by Dame Ngaio Marsh)