No one likes the honorable Galahad

     There came the sound of wheels grinding to a standstill on the gravel outside the front door.

    "Clarence," said Gally.

    "And Mr. Landseer."

    "Don't say 'And Mr. Landseer' in that soupy tone of voice, said Gally sternly. "He hasn't come to steal the spoons."

    "If he is a friend of yours, I should imagine that he is quite capable of doing so. Is he wanted by the police?"

    "How I sympathize with the police," said Lady Hermione. "I know just how they feel."

(from Full Moon, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Painting of a pickled porker

 Freddie, hastening to the bed and gazing down at the canvas which lay upon it, had started back like one who sees some dreadful sight. He was now replacing his monocle in his eye, preparatory to trying again, and Bill looked at him dully.

"You notice something wrong, too?"

"Wrong? My dear old bird!"

"Don't forget it's not finished."

Freddie shook his head. "It's no good taking that line, Blister. Thank heaven it isn't. One wouldn't want a thing like that to spread any further. What on earth made you depict this porker as tight?"

"Tight?"

"The pig I see here is a pig that has obviously been on the toot of a lifetime for days on end. Those glassy eyes. That weak smile. I've seen old Tippy look just like that."

(from Full Moon, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Like a merry-go-round

     Many lovers in his position might have consoled themselves with the reflection that Freddie, being now a married man, was presumably out of the race for Veronica Wedge's hand and heart. But Tipton had had the wrong sort of upbringing to permit of his drawing comfort from any thought like that. The son of parents who after marrying each other had almost immediately started marrying other people with a perseverance worthy of a better cause, his had been one of those childhoods where the faintly bewildered offspring finds himself passed from hand to hand like a medicine ball. And, grown to riper years, he had seen among his friends and acquaintance far too much of that Ex-Wife's Heart Balm Society Love Tangle stuff to be a believer in the durability of the married state.

    That very Doris Jimpson, of whom he had once supposed himself enamoured, had become Doris Boole, Doris Busbridge, and Doris Applejohn in such rapid succession that the quickness of the hand almost deceived the eye.

(from Full Moon, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

The definition of "hoity-toity"

 It is the boast of Barribault's Hotel, which caters principally to American millionaires and visiting maharajahs, that it can make the wrong sort of client feel more like a piece of cheese - and a cheap yellow piece of cheese at that - than any other similar establishment in the world. The personnel of its staff are selected primarily for their ability to curl the upper lip and raise the eyebrows just that extra quarter of an inch which makes all the difference.

(from Full Moon, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Speaking for yourself

     "I do not like your tone, Reginald."

    "Never mind about my tone. I'll attend to my tone. Of all the bally low hounds that ever stepped you are the lowest. So this is what the friendship of years amounts to, is it? You crawl in here and try to cut me out with the girl I love."

    "Well, dash it -"

    "That is quite enough."

    "But, dash it -"

    "I wish to hear no more."

    "But, dash it, I love her, too. It's not my fault if you happen to love her, too, is it? I mean to say, if a fellow loves a girl and another fellow loves her, too, you can't expect the fellow who loves the girl to edge out because he happens to be acquainted with the fellow who loves her, too. When it comes to Love, a chap has got to look out for his own interests, hasn't he? You didn't find Romeo or any of those chaps easing away from the girl just to oblige a pal, did you? Certainly not."

(from Young Men in Spats, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

He would have preferred a gentle breeze

     When large, earnest men with simple, orderly minds fall desperately in love with small, reckless, impulsive girls whose motto is "Anything goes," the result is not infrequently to make them feel as if their souls had been stirred up with a pole; and in conveying the impression that he was labouring under a nervous strain Bill lister in no way deceived his public. Ever since the tempestuous entry into his life of Prudence Garland, he had been feeling almost without interruption rather as one might imagine a leaf to feel when caught up and whirled about in an autumn gale.

    Bill's was essentially a simple, orderly mind. Nature had intended him to be one of those men to whom love, when it comes, comes gently and gradually, progressing in easy stages from the first meeting in rigidly conventional circumstances to the decorous wedding with the ushers showing friends and relatives into the ringside pews. If ever there was a man born to be the morning-coated central figure in a wedding group photograph, it was William Galahad Lister.

(from Full Moon, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Name your doctor

     "Harley Street," he said to the driver. "And don't spare the horses."

    Harley street, as everybody knows, is where medical men collect in gangs, and almost every door you see has burst out into a sort of eczema of brass plates. At a house about halfway down the thoroughfare the following members of the healing profession had elected to mess in together: Hartley Rampling, P. P. Borstal, G. V. Cheesewright, Sir Abercrombie Fitch-Fitch, and E. Jimpson Murgatroyd. The one Tipton was after was E. Jimpson Murgatroyd.

(from Full Moon, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Don't let him pick her friends!

 "I know I should make the most searching inquiries about any young man whom I heard calling Veronica a dream rabbit. I don't wonder Dora is uneasy. She tells me Prudence has been seeing a great deal of Galahad recently, and goodness knows whom he may not have introduced to her. Galahad's idea of a suitable friend for an impressionable young girl might quite easily be a race-course tout or a three-card-trick man."

(from Full Moon, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

What to expect from a Full Moon

 Money is always important in the solution of Blandings impasses, but here it is ubiquitous. Not only do Bill's and Prue's problems require a fiscal solution, but the hopes of the Wedges are shaped by Tipton Plimsoll's fortune, Freddie Threepwood pursues an immense dogfood order like some Ahab hunting a mercantile Moby Dick, and in the end Lord Emsworth must literally purchase his peace of mind.

Only Galahad and his spiritual sister, the Empress, rise above the mercenary approach, the great pig responding solely to simple greed and the aging rake moved by sympathy for star-crossed love and a pure, almost ascetic devotion to creating maximum chaos.

(from the Preface to P. G. Wodehouse's Full Moon, written by D. R. Benson)

Cutting it thin

         Mabry began to eject shells from his gun and to reload. Only a solitary bullet had remained in his gun. As he loaded up there was absolute silence. He was conscious then of the cottonwood leaves whispering in the cool morning air. He was conscious that his cheek stung and that otherwise he was unwounded.

    Once more he had come through. How many breaks could a man get?

(from Heller With a Gun, by Louis L'Amour)

Trust your instincts

     "You're borrowing trouble, King. They'd be afraid to attempt anything now.

    He did not argue, yet King Mabry had that old, uneasy feeling. The whole woods out there were dark, but they did not feel empty, and the hunted man learns to trust his senses. On too many occasions they had saved his life.

(from Heller With a Gun, by Louis L'Amour)

Lost on the landscape

 Day after day the wagons had plodded on, and day after day the snow-covered hills fell behind, the streams were crossed, the lonely camps abandoned to the wilderness. And day after day she seemed to dwindle, to grow less. The vans were tiny things, their bright-colored sides tawdry in the stillness and snow. All was immensity where they seemed to crawl at a snail's pace into the vastness beyond belief.

(from Heller With a Gun, by Louis L'Amour)

Had something else to do

 His shoulders filled the doorway as he went out. For several minutes after he was gone nobody said anything.

"Knew him in Dodge," Williams said suddenly, "and again in Utah. He's salty."

"Has he really killed so many men?"

"He has. Killed one at Doan's store. Fellow name of Les Benham was going to cut Mabry's herd. Mabry said he wasn't."

"Did they cut it?"

"Too busy burying Les Benham."

(from Heller With a Gun, by Louis L'Amour)

He must have overestimated

     "Come far?"

    "No."

    The hostler puffed on his pipe. He had never seen this man before and it was indiscreet to ask questions, but the hostler was a curious man - and he knew that beat-up buckskin.

    He gestured. "Ain't in good shape."

    "Better shape than the man who rode him."

    Griffin, the hostler remembered, was considered a very salty customer in some circles. He must have cut himself into the wrong circle.

(from Heller With a Gun, by Louis L'Amour)

Instincts

     The hunter and the hunted - these two are kin. Their senses are alert to the same stimuli, awaken in the same far-off sounds. A shadow in the wrong place, a flicker of sun reflection, a creak of leather - each may be a warning.

    And for these things and a thousand others the senses of hunter and hunted are alert. Often the exact warning is not recognized; it is a subconscious perception.

    So King Mabry now waited for the snow veil to break once more. He had learned to trust his instincts. Attention might lag, reason might fail, but the instincts were first born and would be the last to die.

(from Heller with a Gun, by Louis L'Amour)

Aunts are worse than cobras down the chimney

 His heart was heavy. It was a kindly heart, and from the very first it had been deeply stirred by the stormy romance of Mr. Ronald and his young lady. He wished that life were as the writers of the detective stories, to which he had become to addicted, portrayed it. In those, no matter what obstacles Fate might interpose in the shape of gangs, shots in the night, underground cellars, sinister Chinamen, poisoned asparagus and cobras down the chimney, the hero always got his girl. The significance of the presence in the library of Lady Constance Keeble and Lady Julia Fish had not escaped him. He feared that it meant the worst.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Be sure to stand downwind

     "Beach, go and bring Pirbright here."

    "He shall do nothing of the kind," said Lady Constance sharply. "The idea of bringing Pirbright into the library!"

    It was not often that Beach found himself in agreement with the chatelaine of Blandings, but he could not but support her attitude now. Like all butlers, he held definite views on the sanctity of the home and frowned upon attempts on the part of the outside staff to enter it - especially when, like Pirbright they smelt so very strongly of pigs. Five minutes of that richly scented man in the library, felt Beach, and you would have to send the place to the cleaner's.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

A friend of pigs

     "You think you can cope with this pig?"

    "Certainly. I am not afraid of pigs. Pigs like me."

    At these words, Monty found his respect for a breed of animal which he had always rather admired waning a good deal. No animal of the right sort, he felt, could like Lord Tilbury.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Not a successful interview

     He had never, he realized, been exactly what you might call sanguine when making his way to the Emsworth Arms to plead with Lord Tilbury to act like a sportsman and a gentleman. All the ruling of the form-book, he knew, was against him. And yet he had nursed, despite the whisperings of Reason, a sort of thin, sickly hope. This hope the proprietor of the Mammoth had slain dead within five minutes of his arrival.

    When Monty had claimed consideration on the ground that it was through no fault of his own that he was not charging in, manuscript in hand, Lord Tilbury had remained mute and stony. When he had gone on to point out that Pilbeam could not have got the thing but for him, Lord Tilbury had uttered a sharp, sneering snort. And when, as happened a little farther on in the scene, Monty had called his former employer a fat, double-crossing wart-hog, the latter had terminated the interview by walking away with his hands under his coat-tails.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)

Not fond of pigs

He had only himself to blame - that was what made it all the more bitter. If he had not so casually given his casting vote in favour of shifting this infernal pig to new quarters, he would not now have been faced by a problem which every moment seemed to become more difficult of situation.

 For Pilbeam was afraid of pigs. He seemed to remember having read somewhere that if you go into a pig's sty and the pig doesn't now you it comes for you like a tiger and chews you to ribbons. Greedy though he was for Lord Tilbury's gold, something told him that never, no matter how glittering this reward, would he be able to bring himself to go into that sty in quest of the manuscript, guarded as it now was by this ravening beast. The Prodigal Son might have mixed with these animals on a clubby basis, but Percy Pilbeam knew himself to be incapable of imitating him.

(from Heavy Weather, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)