P. G. Wodehouse

“ Where Colonel Wyvern beheld beauty and Mr. Bywater opulence, Pat saw only flashiness, vulgarity, and general horribleness. Piercing with woman's intuitive eye through an outer crust which to vapid and irreflective males might possibly seem attractive, she saw Dolly as a vampire and a menace—the sort of woman who goes about the place ensnaring miserable fat-headed innocent young men who have lived all their lives in the country and so lack the experience to see through females of her type.
For beyond a question, felt Pat, this girl must have come to Rudge in brazen pursuit of poor old Johnnie. ”

“ Carmody was not much of a spectacle, but Soapy, eyeing him, felt that he had never beheld anything lovelier. He was not a fisherman himself, but he knew all about fishermen. They became, he was aware, when engaged on their favourite pursuit, virtually monomaniacs. Earthquakes might occur in their immediate neighbourhood, dynasties fall and pestilences ravage the land, but they would just go on fishing. As long as the bait held out, Lester Carmody, sitting in that punt, was for all essential purposes as good as if he had been crammed to the brim of the finest knock-out drops. ”

“ Molloy was conscious of a feeling of almost incredulous awe. It was the sort of feeling which would come to a man who saw miracles happening all around him. He could hardly believe that things could possibly run as smoothly as they appeared to be doing. He had anticipated a certain amount of difficulty in selling Chimp Twist to Mr. Carmody, as he phrased it to himself, and had looked forward with not a little apprehension to a searching inquisition into Chimp Twist's bona fides. And now, it seemed, Mr. Carmody knew Chimp personally and was, no doubt, prepared to receive him without a question. ”

“ John hesitated no longer. Hugo be blowed! His Better Self be blowed! Everything and everybody be blowed except this really excellent old gentleman who, though he might have been better tailored, was so obviously a mine of information on what a young man should know. Drawing a deep breath and springing smartly to attention, he held out his arms in a soldierly manner, and Pat came into them like a little boat sailing into harbour after a storm. A faint receding sigh told him that his Better Self had withdrawn discomfited, but the sigh was drowned by the triumphant approval of the Ancestor. ”

“ Carmody. All he felt at this instant was an almost suffocating elation. He stretched out an unsteady hand.
"Oh, yes," he heard himself saying. "That ticket. Quite so, of course. Bolt left a bag for me at Shrub Hill Station."
"He did."
"Give me the ticket."
"Later," said John, and put it back in his pocket.
Mr. Carmody's elation died away. There was no question now about the peculiar look in his companion's eye. It was a grim look. A hard, accusing look. Not at all the sort of look a man with a tender conscience likes to have boring into him. ”

“ Nor, at the discovery that a nephew whom he had supposed to be twenty miles away was standing at his elbow, did anything in the nature of sudden joy help to fill him with sweetness and light.
"How the devil did you get here?" were his opening words of welcome. His scarlet face vanished for an instant into the folds of a large handkerchief; then reappeared, wearing a look of acute concern. "You didn't," he quavered, "come in the Dex-Mayo?"
A thought to shake the sturdiest man. It was twenty miles from Rudge Hall to Healthward Ho, and twenty miles back again from Healthward Ho to Rudge Hall. ”

“ A wanderer through the stable yard at about the hour of ten would have perceived a light in an upper window: and had he taken the trouble to get a ladder and climb up and look in would have beheld John Carroll seated at his table, busy with a pile of accounts.
In an age so notoriously avid of pleasure as the one in which we live it is rare to find a young man of such sterling character that he voluntarily absents himself from a village concert in order to sit at home and work: and, contemplating John, one feels quite a glow. ”

“ She looked as if she had spent her time at Le Touquet playing thirty-six holes of golf a day.
"Pat!" cried John, and something seemed to catch at his throat. There was a mist in front of his eyes. His heart was thumping madly.
She extended her hand composedly. In her this meeting after long separation had apparently stirred no depths. Her demeanour was friendly, but matter-of-fact.
"Well, Johnnie. How nice to see you again. You're looking very brown and rural. Where's Hugo?"
It takes two to hoist a conversation to an emotional peak. John choked, and became calmer. ”

“ A dull despair settled upon Soapy. It was plain to him now that he had unwittingly delivered himself over into the clutches of a bore who had probably been pining away for someone on whom to pour out his wealth of stored-up conversation. Words had begun to flutter out of this butler like bats out of a barn. He had become a sort of human Topical Talk on rabbits. He was speaking of rabbits he had known in his hot youth—their manners, customs, and the amount of lettuce they had consumed per diem. ”

“ Walking with her father along High Street on the sixth morning, she had to confess herself disappointed with Rudge.
There are times in everyone's experience when Life, after running merrily for a while through pleasant places, seems suddenly to strike a dull and depressing patch of road: and this was what was happening now to Pat. The sense, which had come to her so strongly in the lobby of the Lincoln Hotel in Curzon Street, of being in a world unworthy of her—a world cold and unsympathetic and full of an inferior grade of human being, had deepened. ”

“ Hugo started. Was it some sound, some distant stealthy footstep, that had caused his companion to speak? He stared into the night.
"Fat head!" said Emily. "Can't even pull somebody out of a bush."
She laughed mirthlessly, and Hugo, now keenly on the alert, rose from his seat and gazed this way and that. And then, moving softly away from him at the end of the path, he saw a dark figure.
Instantly, Hugo Carmody became once more the man of action. With a stern shout he dashed along the path. And he had not gone half a dozen feet when the ground seemed suddenly to give way under him. ”

“ It was a fair summer night, warm and still, but with her arrival a keen east wind seemed to pervade the lobby. Pat was looking pale and proud, and Hugo's usually effervescent demeanour had become toned down to a sort of mellow sadness. He had the appearance of a man who has recently been properly ticked off by a woman for Taking Me to Places Like That.
"Oh, hullo, John," he murmured in a low, bedside voice. He brightened a little, as a man will who, after a bad quarter of an hour with an emotional girl, sees somebody who may possibly furnish an alternative target for her wrath. ”

“ Carmody had preferred to roam about on solid ground, hunting in the grass for windfalls. He had always hated heights, and this morning found him more prejudiced against them than ever. It says much for crime as a wholesome influence in a man's life that the lure of the nefarious job which he had undertaken should have induced him eventually after much hesitation to set foot on the ladder's lowest rung. Nothing but a single-minded desire to do down an innocent insurance company could have lent him the necessary courage. ”

“ Chimp digested this.
"Who's going to buy it when you do get it away?" he asked.
"Oh, gee!" said Dolly. "You know as well as I do there's dozens of people on the other side who'll buy it."
"And how are you going to get it away? If it's in a closet in Carmody's house and Carmody has the key...?"
"Now there," said Mr. Molloy, with a deferential glance at his wife, as if requesting her permission to re-open a delicate subject, "the madam and I had a kind of an argument. I wanted to wait till a chance came along sort of natural, but Dolly's all for quick action. You know what women are. Impetuous." ”

“ Molloy. On a morning like this, with all Nature smiling, an American millionaire might well feel just in the mood to put up a few hundred thousand dollars for something. For July had come in on golden wings, and the weather now was the kind of weather to make a poet sing, a lover love, and a Scotch business man subscribe largely to companies formed for the purpose of manufacturing diamonds out of coal tar. On such a morning, felt Mr. Carmody, anybody ought to be willing to put up any sum for anything. ”

“ Before succeeding to his present position of head of the family and squire of Rudge Hall, Lester Carmody had contrived to put away in gilt-edged securities a very nice sum indeed, the fruit of his labours in the world of business. But it was his whim to regard himself as a struggling pauper.
"But all this...." Mr. Molloy indicated with a wave of his hand the smiling gardens, the rolling park and the opulent-looking trees reflected in the waters of the moat. "Surely this means a barrel of money?"
"Everything that comes in goes out again in expenses. There's no end to my expenses. ”

“ He objected to being treated as a junior—and, what was more, as a half-witted junior—by solemn young men with pink faces.
"What's the argument?" asked Ronnie Fish, anchoring self and cigarette holder at Mr. Carmody's side.
Mr. Molloy smiled genially.
"No argument, brother," he replied with that bluff heartiness which Lester Carmody had come to dislike so much. "I was merely telling our good friend and host here that the best investment under the broad blue canopy of God's sky is Oil."
"Quite right," said Ronnie Fish. "He's perfectly correct, my dear Carmody." ”

“ It was all very well for a man like Mr. Molloy to speak sneeringly of $700,000. To most people—and Mr. Carmody was one of them—$700,000 is quite a nice little sum. Mr. Molloy, if he saw $700,000 lying in the gutter, might not think it worth his while to stoop and pick it up, but Mr. Carmody could not imitate that proud detachment. The thought that he had as his guest at Rudge a man who combined with a bottomless purse a taste for antiquities and that only the imbecile laws relating to heirlooms prevented them consummating a deal racked him from head to foot. ”

“ You will find Rudge-in-the-Vale, if you search carefully, in that pleasant section of rural England where the gray stone of Gloucestershire gives place to Worcestershire's old red brick. Quiet, in fact, almost unconscious, it nestles beside the tiny river Skirme and lets the world go by, somnolently content with its Norman church, its eleven public-houses, its Pop.—to quote the Automobile Guide—of 3,541, and its only effort in the direction of modern progress, the emporium of Chas. Bywater, Chemist.
Chas. Bywater is a live wire. He takes no afternoon siesta, but works while others sleep. ”

“ Men like these ex-collegians, who have really got the saxophone virus into their systems, seldom have long lucid intervals between the attacks. Very soon they were at it again, and Mr. Molloy, rising, led Pat gallantly out onto the floor. His daughter, following them with a bright eye as she busied herself with a lip stick, laughed amusedly.
"She little knows!"
John, like Pat a short while before, had fallen into a train of thought. From this he now woke with a start to the realization that he was alone with this girl and presumably expected by her to make some effort at being entertaining. ”

“ Carmody, gently urging the punt out into the open, "just to make everything seem more natural. One thousand pounds is the sum I am proposing to give for the recovery of this stolen property. You had better try for that. Well, I must not keep you here all the morning, chattering away like this. No doubt you have much to do."
The punt floated out into the sunshine, and the roof of the boathouse hid this fat, conscienceless man from Soapy's eyes. From somewhere out in the great open spaces beyond came the sound of a paddle, wielded with a care-free joyousness. ”

“ In all human affairs the semblance of any given thing is bound to vary considerably with the point of view. To Chimp Twist, as he endeavoured to comply with this request, it seemed incredible that what he was doing could strike anyone as humorous. To Hugo, on the other hand, it appeared as if the entertainment had now reached its apex of wholesome fun. ”

“ In the matter of seats, a man who has ridden twenty miles on an elderly push-bicycle becomes an exacting critic.
"Gee! I feel bad!" he murmured.
It was a natural remark, perhaps, for a man in his condition to make, but it had the effect of adding several degrees Fahrenheit to his companion's already impressive warmth. For some moments Chimp Twist, wrestling with his emotion, could find no form of self-expression beyond a curious spluttering noise.
"Yes, sir," proceeded Mr. Molloy, "I feel bad. All the way over here on a bicycle, Chimpie, that's where I've been. ”

“ John had been contemplating none. Chimp and his companion had ceased to matter, and the fury which was making his face rather an unpleasant spectacle for two peace-loving men shut up in a small room with him was directed exclusively against his uncle Lester. Rudge Hall and its treasures were sacred to John; and the thought that Mr. Carmody, whose trust they were, had framed this scheme for the house's despoilment was almost more than he could bear.
"It isn't us you ought to be sore at," urged Mr. Molloy. "It's that old uncle of yours." ”