Saki

“ That Agatha would get on to a yak in company with a lover even in the comparative seclusion of Thibet is unthinkable. I very much doubt if she’d do it with her own husband in the privacy of the Simplon tunnel. But poetry, as I’ve remarked before, should always stimulate the imagination.
By the way, when you asked me the other day to dine with you on the 14th, I said I was dining with the Duchess. Well, I’m not. I’m dining with you. ”

“ I never can remember which Party Irene discourages with her support, but I shan’t forget an occasion when I was staying at her place and she gave me a pamphlet to leave at the house of a doubtful voter, and some grapes and things for a woman who was suffering from a chill on the top of a patent medicine. I thought it much cleverer to give the grapes to the former and the political literature to the sick woman, and the Duchess was quite absurdly annoyed about it afterwards. ”

“ She probably thought Kaikobad was an unfashionable German spa, where you’d meet matrimonial bargain-hunters and emergency Servian kings. My temper was beginning to slip its moorings by that time. I look rather nice when I lose my temper. ”