Corky's uncle, you see, didn't want him to be an artist. He didn't think he had any talent in that direction. He was always urging him to chuck Art and go into the jute business and start at the bottom and work his way up. And what Corky said was that, while he didn't know what they did at the bottom of a jute business, instinct told him that it was something too beastly for words.
(from Carry On, Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"I have never had such a shock in my life. The book is an outrage. It is impossible. It is horrible!
"But, dash it, the family weren't so bad as all that."
"It is not a history of the family at all. Your uncle has written his reminiscences! He calls them 'Recollections of a Long Life.'"
I began to understand. As I say, Uncle Willoughby had been somewhat on the tabasco side as a young man, and it began to look as if he might have turned out somethign pretty fruity if he had started recollecting his long life.
"If half of what he has written is true," said Florence, "your uncle's youth must have been perfectly appalling. The moment we began to read, he plunged straight into a most scandalous story of how he and my father were thrown out of a music-hall in 1887!"
"Why?"
"I decline to tell you why."
It must have been something pretty bad. It took a lot to make them cuck people out of music-halls in 1887.
(from Carry On, Jeeves, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Corky, old horse, I have in my time extracted various sums of money from various people, and some of them have given cheerfully of theri abundance and others have unbelted in a manner that you might call wry. But never in the whole of my career have I beheld a fellow human being cough up in quite the spirit that his bloke Joe the Lawyer did. He was a short-necked man, and there was one moment when I thought his blood-pressure was going to be too much for him. He turned a rather vivid shade of maroon, and his lips trembled as if he were praying. But in the end he dipped into the satchel and counted out the money."
(from "The Level Business Head," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
The Battler was a heavweight pugilist whom Ukridge had dug up from somewhere and managed intermittently over a period of a year or so. In which enterprise he had been considerably hampered by the other's unfortunate temperatment. A peerless scrapper, this Billson, with muscles strong as iron bands, but of the very maximum boneheadedness. An eccentric soul. He had a habit of developing a sentimental pity for his opponent toward the middle of the second round, or else he would get religion on the eve of battle and refuse to enter the ring. It complicated things a good deal for his manager.
(from "The Come-back of Battling Billson," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Patrick stopped at the newsstand for cigarettes and the late papers. I bought a book, a great collection of world masterpieces for twenty-five cents. Not that I expected to read it, but I never feel entirely equipped without a book, particularly when it's everything ever written for only two bits.
(from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)
In that particular studio which had engaged her services, it seems a good deal of latitude is granted to the distinguished authors on the pay-roll. The kindly powers-that-be recognize the existence of the artist temperment and make allowances for it. If, therefore, my aunt had confined herself to snootering directions, harrying camera-men, and chasing supervisors up trees, nothing would have been said. But there is one thing the artist soul must not do at the Colossal-Superfine, and that is swat the Main Boss with a jewelled hand over the ear-hole.
And this, in a moment of emotion due to the fact that he had described some dialogue submitted by her as a lot of baloney that didn't mean a thing, my Aunt Julia had done.
(from "Ukridge and the Home From Home," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
He looked cynical again. "Did you question Moran yourself?"
Patrick's nod was full of gloom.
"I tried. It's like talking at a lump of dough."
(from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)
As he mentioned his name, his tone seemed to take on a sort of respectful affection. One of he mysteries of my life is why this godlike man, while treating me, who pay my rent regularly, with a distant hauteur, as if I were something very young and callow in baggy trousers whom he had just caught eating the entree with a fish-knife, should positively fawn on Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge, who is - as has been for years - a recognized blot on Society.
(from "Ukridge and the Home from Home," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
I don't suppose you are familiar with Bottleton East, except by name. It is a prett tough sort of neighbourhood, rather like Limehouse only with fewer mysterious Chinamen. The houses are small and grey, cats abound, and anyone who has a bit of old paper or a piece of orange peel throws it on the pavement.
(from "The Masked Troubadour," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
The air was colder and clearer, but all the same, the dim-out made the night peculiar. We walked very slowly. I slipped my hand through Patrick's arm and said I would never get over the feeling you had in a dim-out that somebody was creeping up behind with the idea of socking you in the back of the head. He grinned, but as he lit our cigarettes he quietly looked behind us.
(from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)
"Mr. Carrington, who reminded me of a biscuit with a Boston accent, wore a dinner coat."
(from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)
I lifted eyebrows. Stealing her own technique, I did it as though they weighed tons and made lifting a chore.
(from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)
"Where, I've often asked myself, are the great sweeping moustaches of our boyhood? I've got a photograph of my grandfather as a young man in the album at home, and he's just a pair of eyes staring over a sort of quickset hedge."
(from "Buried Treasure," by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
I never notice noses unless they are wrong for a face, and his wasn't.
(from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)
"I told Mother I was going to stand up this afternoon when the police came back to ask questions and tell the truth about Anna, but Mother says it isn't fair to say unpleasant things about the dead. The dead can't answer back, she says."
(from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)
"New York is the kind of place where everybody tries to act like the best people because nobody knows if they are or aren't."
(from The Pink Umbrella, by Frances Crane)
