Michael Arlen

“ Puce’s attitude was always a wholesome skepticism—and a rather aggressive skepticism at that, as Hillier had remarked with amusement when he had spoken of the ghost in, as he had put it, the house of Kerr-Anderson’s aunt. Sir Charles had said: “There are two sorts of men on whom ghosts have an effect: those who are silly enough to believe in them, and those who are silly enough not to believe in them.” ”

“ I have been betting all my life, but I have always had a preference for those bets which did not turn on a man’s life or death—”
“You can’t frighten me with that junk, Hillier,” snapped Mr. Puce, and it was plain to see that Mr. Puce did not like Sir Charles Hillier, for Mr. Puce was full of “pep,” while Sir Charles was always very tired and always faintly amused.
“My aunt,” said young Kerr-Anderson, “will be very annoyed if anything happens and she gets to hear of it. She hates a corpse in her house more than anyone I know. You're sure you are going on with it, Puce?” ”

“ The very air of the tall pedestrian was a challenge to the lazy content of the sunlit noon. He was walking at a great pace, his felt hat swinging from his hand. A giant he was, his hair graying, his massive face set with assurance.
“By all that’s holy!” gasped the elder of the two observers. A little lean gentleman that was, with a lined face which had been handsome in a striking way but for the haggard marks of the dissipations of a man of the mode. He had only one arm, and that added a curiously flippant air of deviltry to his little, lean, sardonic person.
“Puce!” ”

“ Suddenly he sat up on the bed, his back against the oak head. Something had moved in the room. He was certain something had moved. Somewhere by the foot of the bed!
His eyes peering into the darkness, Mr. Puce stretched his right hand to the table on which lay the automatic. The gesture reminded him of Geraldine’s when she had touched the white rabbit-fur. ... Aw, damn Geraldine! Those idiotic twins kept chasing about a man’s mind. Mr. Puce grasped the automatic firmly in his hand. ”

“ A black pearl stained his soft shirt-front, and his manner was so impersonal as to be almost rude, which is a fault of breeding when it is bored, a fault particularly annoying to gentlemen from America, and rightly.
“The terms of the bet,” said Sir Charles Hillier in his attractively tired voice, “are that this candle must suffice you for the night. ”

“ He did, however, manage to keep awake for some time merely by concentrating on wicked words, on Hillier’s face—and how its mocking expression would change for the better were his, Puce’s, foot to be firmly pressed down on its surface—and on Julia and Geraldine. For the luckless twins, by the very idiocy with which they were presented, kept walking about Mr. Puce’s mind, and as he began to nod to the demands of a healthy and tired body, he could not resist wondering if their home town had been Wigan or Bolton, and if Julia’s head had been severed from ear to ear or only halfway. .... ”

“ Get your elbows squared for shoving a pen along a check for the benefit of Howard Puce.”
“I like Americans,” said Sir Charles Hillier vaguely. “They are so enthusiastic. Good night, Puce, and God bless you. I hope you have better luck than the last man who spent a night in that room. He was strangled. Come along, Anderson. We can find our way out with matches. By the way, Puce, don’t let off that gun of yours unless you have to. ”

“ The reader can imagine with what excess of gayety Julia and Geraldine heard one day from their father that he had inherited a considerable property from a distant relation, and the reader can go on imagining the exaltation of the girls when they heard that the property included a mansion in Pimlico, since that for which they had always yearned their hardest was to enjoy the glittering life of the famous metropolis. ”

“ THE tale of the Phantom Footsteps (wrote Basil Spain) is still whispered with awe and loathing among the people of that decayed but genteel district of London known as Pimlico; although, to be sure, the stranger will undoubtedly find the lips of householders hermetically sealed about the affair, a reticence due, no doubt, to their natural desire not to increase the contempt in which. ”