Arthur Conan Doyle

“ What was it, then?’ asked Maude, looking up with her sympathetic eyes. It is at such moments that a man realises what the companionship of women means. The clouds melted before the sun.
‘What an ass I was! I began to think of all sorts of horrible things. Never mind, Maude! We are out for a holiday. Hang the future! Let us live in the present.’
‘I always do,’ said Maude, and she spoke for her sex.
‘Well, what now? Buttered toast or suède gloves?’
‘Business first!’ said Maude primly, and so proceeded to save her sixpence on the gloves. ”

“ For the underground railway is blessed as regards privacy above all other lines, and where could a loving couple be more happy, who have been torn apart by cruel fate for seven long hours or so? It was with a groan that Frank remarked that they had reached Mark Lane.
‘Bother!’ said Maude, and wondered if there were any shop near where she could buy hairpins. As every lady knows, or will know, there is a very intimate connection between hairpins and a loving husband. ”

“ Do you think I might take it?’
‘It isn’t quite the thing.’
‘But it can’t matter, and it isn’t wrong, and we are quite alone.’ She picked off the little flake of plaster, and her heart sprang into her mouth as she did so, for there came an indignant snort from her very elbow, and there was a queer little smoke-dried, black-dressed person who seemed to have risen, like the Eastern genii or a modern genius, in a single instant. A pair of black list slippers explained the silence of his approach. ”

“ It’s a way they ’as when the fresh air strikes ’em. An’ she the same, an’ ‘is dust just fell through the chinks o’ the wood and mixed itself with ’ers.’
‘O Frank!’ Maude’s ready tears sprang to her eyes. She put her hand upon her husband’s and was surprised to find how cold it was. Women never realise that the male sex is the more sensitive. He had not said, ‘O Maude!’ because he could not. ”

“ Here and there upon the walls were marble inscriptions in the Latin tongue, with pompous allegorical figures with trumpets, for our ancestors blew them in stone as well as in epitaphs over their tombs. They loved to die, as they had lived, with dignity and with affectation. ”

“ She wrote it out in this form, and took it section by section. ‘Pepys,’ that was unintelligible. ‘Buttered toast,’ no sense in that. ‘Suède gloves,’ yes, she had told Frank that when she came to town, she would buy some suède gloves at a certain shop in the City, where she could get for three and threepence a pair which would cost her three and ninepence in Woking. Maude was so conscientiously economical, that she was always prepared to spend two shillings in railway fares to reach a spot where a sixpence was to be saved, and to lavish her nerve and energy freely in the venture. ”

“ Among others, there is that absurd eagerness to save the striking of a second match, which occasions so many burned fingers, and such picturesque language. And again, there is the desire to compress a telegraphic message into the minimum sixpennyworth, and so send an ambiguous and cryptic sentence, when sevenpence would have made it as clear as light. We all tend to be stylists in our telegrams.
A week after the conversation about Mr. Pepys, when some progress had been made with the reading of the Diary, Maude received the following wire from Frank -
‘Mrs. ”