"Was he sane, do you think?"
"Absolutely, for legal purposes. We have three opinions from leading doctors - collected by him in case of accidents, I suppose - each of which declares him perfectly sound from the collar upward. But a man can be pretty far gone, you know, without being legally insane, and old Nutcombe - well, suppose we call him whimsical. He seems to have zigzagged between the normal and the eccentric.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
It was stimulating. The probability was that all Jerry Nichols wanted to tell him was that he had received stable information about some horse or had been given a box for the Empire, but for all that it was stimulating.
Bill looked at his watch. He could spare half an hour. He set out at once for the offices of the eminent law firm of Nichols, Nichols, Nichols, and Nichols, of which aggregation of Nicholses his friend Jerry was the last and smallest.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
When she became engaged to Bill she had reached a point where she could obtain without difficulty good parts in the touring companies of London successes, but beyond that it seemed it was impossible for her to soar. It was not, perhaps, a very exhilarating life, but, except to the eyes of love, there was nothing tragic about it. It was the cumulative effect of having a mother in reduced circumstances and grumbling about it, of being compelled to work and grumbling about that, and of achieving in her work only a semi-success and grumbling about that also, that - backed by her looks - enabled Claire to give quite a number of people, and Bill Dawlish in particular, the impression that she was a modern martyr, only sustained by her indomitable courage.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"I wish," said Claire, fretfully, leading the way down the grillroom stairs, "that you wouldn't let all London sponge on you like this. I keep telling you not to. I should have thought that if anyone needed to keep what little money he has got it was you."
Certainly Lord Dawlish would have been more prudent not to have parted with even eleven shillings, for he was not a rich man. Indeed, with the single exception of the Earl of Wetherby, whose finances were so irregular that he could not be said to possess an income at all, he was the poorest man of his rank in the British Isles.
(from Uneasy Money, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
It seemed to her that she was very much alone now. She was marooned on a desert island of froth and laughter. Everything that mattered she had lost.
Even Bill had gone from her. The bitter justice of Kirk's words came home to her now in her time of clear thinking. It was all true. In the first excitement of the new life he had bored her. She had looked upon Mrs. Porter as a saviour who brought her freedom together with an easy conscience. It had been so simple to deceive herself, to cheat herself into the comfortable belief that all that could be done for him was being done, when, as concerned the essential thing, as Kirk had said, there was no child of the streets who was not better off.
She tramped her round of social duties mechanically. Everything bored her now. The joy of life had gone out of her. She ate the bread of sorrow in captivity.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Her father, she knew, had always had a high opinion of Bailey's business instincts, and that was good enough for her. She could not know how completely revolutionized the latter's mind had become since the old man's death, and how freedom had turned him from a steady young man of business to a frenzied financier.
It was common report now that Bailey was taking big chances. Some went so far as to say that he was "asking for it," "it" in his case being presumably the Nemesis which waits on those who take big chances in an uncertain market. It was in the air that he was "going up against" the Pinkney-Dowd group and the Norman-Graham combination, and everybody knew that the cemeteries of Wall Street were full of the unhonoured graves of others who in years past had attempted to do the same.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
He walked on, raising his face to the storm, finding in it a curious relief. A magical coolness had crept into the air, and with it a strange calm into his troubled mind. He looked back at the scene through which he had passed as at something infinitely remote. He could not realize distinctly what had happened. He was only aware that everything was over, that with a few words he had broken his life into small pieces. Too impatient to unravel the tangled knot, he had cut it, and nothing could mend it now.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Bailey hated Basil. Men, as a rule, did, without knowing why. Basil's reputation was shady, without being actually bad. He was a suspect who had never been convicted. New York contained several husbands who eyed him askance, but could not verify their suspicions, and the apparent hopelessness of ever doing so made them look on Basil as a man who had carried smoothness into the realms of fine art. He was considered too gifted to be wholesome. The men of his set, being for the most part amiably stupid, resented his cleverness.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
Mr. Penway was good enough to approve of his progress. Being free from any morbid distaste for himself, he attributed that progress to its proper source. As he said once in a moment of expansive candor, he could, given a free hand and something to drink and smoke while doing it, make an artist out of two sticks and a lump of coal.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Burn them!" said Mr. Penway, lighting a cigar with the air of one restoring his tissues after a strenuous ordeal. "Burn the lot. They're awful. Darned amateur nightmares. They offend the eye. Cast them into a burning fiery furnace."
Kirk nodded. The criticism was just. It erred, if at all, on the side of mildness. Certainly something had happened to him since he perpetrated those daubs. He had developed. He saw things with new eyes.
"I guess I had better start right in again at the beginning," he said.
"Earlier than that," amended Mr. Penway.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
There are moments when a man on parole forgets his promise. All thought of rules and prohibitions went from Kirk. He rose from his seat, grabbed his son with both hands, and hugged him. We cannot even begin to estimate the number of bacilli which must have rushed, whooping with joy, on to the unfortunate child. Under a microscope it would probably have looked like an Old Home Week. And Kirk did not care. He simply kept on hugging. That was the sort of man he was - thoroughly heartless.
"Bill, you're great!" he cried.
Bill had been an amazed party to the incident. Nothing of this kind had happened to him for so long that he had forgotten there were children to whom this sort of thing did happen. Then he recollected a similar encounter with a bearded man down in the hall when he came in one morning from his ride in the automobile. A moment later he had connected his facts.
This man who had no beard was the same man as the man who had a beard, and this behaviour was a personal eccentricity of his. The thought crossed his mind that Aunty Lora would not approve of this.
And then, surprisingly, there came the thought that he did not care whether Aunty Lora approved or not. He liked it, and that was enough for him.
The seeds of revolt had been sown in the bosom of William Bannister.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
In his novel, "The Coming of Bill," P. G. Wodehouse refers to "Mrs. Partington sweeping back the Atlantic Ocean with her broom." This evidently refers to an illustration published in Puck magazine in 1912 showing a woman labeled "Blue Law Enforcement" standing on the shore at the ocean, using a broom labeled "Raids on Gambling Houses" to sweep puddles labeled "Police Graft" and "Gambling House Profits" back into the ocean as a wave labeled "The Tendency of Man to Gamble" rolls toward shore.
Ruth was generally ready to join him in ridiculing their new acquaintances. She had none of that reverence for the great and the near-great which, running to seed, becomes snobbery.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
And if Steve ha had the pluck to tell Mamie that he loved her, as he stood before her dripping with the water which he had suffered in silence rather than betray her, she would have fallen into his arms. For Steve at that moment had all the glamour for her of the self-sacrificing hero of a moving-picture film. He had not actually risked death for her, perhaps, but he had taken a sudden cold shower-bath without a murmur - all for her.
Mamie was thrilled. She looked at him with the gleaming eyes of devotion.
But Steve, just because he knew that he was wet and fancied that he must look ridiculous, held his peace.
And presently, his secret still locked in his bosom, and his collar sticking limply to his neck, he crept downstairs, avoiding the society of his fellow man, and slunk out into the night where, if there was no Mamie, there were, at any rate, dry clothes.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"I shall bear up," said Kirk, when this fact was brought home to him. "I mistrust your aunt Lora as I should mistrust some great natural force which may become active at any moment and give you yours. An earthquake, for instance. I have no quarrel with your Aunt Lora in her quiescent state, but I fear the developments of that giant mind. We are better off without her."
"All the same," said Ruth loyally, "she's rather a dear. And we ought to remember that, if it hadn't been for her, you and I would never have met."
"I do remember it. And I'm grateful. But I can't help feeling that a woman capable of taking other people's lives and juggling with them as if they were india-rubber balls as she did with ours is likely at any moment to break out in a new place. My gratitude to her is the sort of gratitude you would feel toward a cyclone if you were walking home late for dinner and it caught you up and deposited you on your doorstep.
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"You know, Kirk, we are both frightfully extravagant. I'm sure we are spending too much money as it is. You know you sold out some of your capital only the other day."
"It was only that once. And you had set your heart on that pendant. Surely to goodness, if I drag you away from a comfortable home to live in a hovel, the least I can do is to - "
"You didn't drag me. I just walked in and sat down, and you couldn't think how to get rid of me, so in despair you married me."
(from The Coming of Bill, by Sir Pelham Wodehouse)
"Been waiting long?"
"Long enough to have eaten if I'd thought of it. As it was, all I got was the coffee."
That made the second lie. She had not been here for some time, and she had not come right here from home. He tried to give her the benefit of the doubt. Maybe the visit to the Upshaw Building was so much a habit that she did not consider it. Still, it was out of her way in coming here.
He wanted to believe her. Maybe that's why cops get cynical - they are lied to so often.
(from "I Hate To Tell His Widow," by Louis L'Amour)
