Various

“ A primrose that really had wings! A flying primrose! A primrose that could go anywhere just like the bee. It darted hither and thither so gaily, alighting where it wished and then soaring up again right into the blue sky above the earth.
The solitary primrose called to it, but it did not hear, and was soon out of sight.
"So primroses needn't always stop where they are till they die," she said to herself. "Why did the bee deceive [pg 315] me? If I were like that I could see the garden and the gardener and the pretty gay sitting-rooms and the rich people." ”

“ Amory has indeed all my sympathy, so badgered is she by Mr. Onions, so relentlessly forced into ignominious positions; and I cannot feel, as I should do, that she would have achieved those ignominies without Mr. Onions' impelling hand behind her. I have myself considerable sympathy for cranks, and perhaps that is why I regard Mr. Onions' satire as a dry, gritty business. His humour is, of course, always a delightful thing, but here I fancy that he has not drawn the true line between comedy and farce, between satire that preserves the probabilities and indiscriminate exaggeration. ”

“ Wilkinson is a sculptor. I don't mean that he lives by sculping. No. As he puts it himself: "My lower self, the self that wants bread and meat and warmth and shelter, lives on unearned increment. My higher self, the only self that counts, lives on Art." ”

“ I was to learn that not sloth but a deep purpose dictated his movements, or his lack of movement.
"My boy," said Uncle James, "more evil is wrought by early rising than by want of thought. Happy homes are broken up by it. Why do men leave charming wives and run away with quite unattractive adventuresses? Because good women always get up early. Bad women, on the other hand, invariably rise late. To prize a man out of bed at some absurd hour like nine-thirty is to court disaster. To take my own case, when I first wake in the morning my mind is one welter of unkindly thoughts. ”

“ I said; then, as I caught a side view of the clay head, "I say! Am I as frightful as that?"
"As frightful as that!" snorted Wilkinson; "why, I've flattered you, if anything. People never know what they're like. There's such a lot of rotten vanity knocking about."
When the last sitting was over my wrongs found voice.
"When I first sat to you," I said in a tense tone, "I was comparatively happy; my self-esteem was in a healthy state; I felt that I was well-looking at my best, even good-looking. ”

“ The vagaries of feminine fashion are undoubtedly a source of misgiving and disquietude to those, like ourselves, who favour the extension of civil rights to women. But, amid all the evidences of frivolity and extravagance which pain the judicious, we need never relinquish the hope that, once the pendulum swings backwards into the direction of sanity, its retrogression will probably be beneficial, even though we cannot pronounce it satisfactory. ”

“ One has always the impression that the rationalist in him is deliberately repressing the mystic, lest his case be weakened by a suspicion of sentimentalism. For it must be obvious that not a cold, still less a squalid, but a generous purpose alone could inspire the fervour that flashes between the reasoned lines. When Mr. Angell pleads that policy is directed towards "self-interest," an easily misunderstandable pronouncement, it is no mean self-interest he has in view but a quality of high civilising and social value. ”

“ I think of all the men who owe me money, and hate them. I review the regiment of women who have refused to marry me, and loathe them. I meditate on my faithful dog, Ponto, and wish that I had kicked him overnight. To introduce me to the human race at that moment would be to let loose a scourge upon society. ”

“ They quarrel alike over details of business policy; but they always stand together where profit is obviously to be made by a common attitude, or where they find themselves in a tight corner. Yet the author has preserved a nice distinction between them. It is Potash, the elder of the two, and encumbered by fetters of domestic affection, who is the weaker vessel, and commits the indiscretions with whose issue he is impotent to cope; it is Perlmutter, with the quicker brains, contemptuous but devoted, who throws all the blame where it is due, yet stands by to share the punishment. ”

“ You made me sit here—I didn't want to do it."
"Oh, people make practice for one, whatever they're like."
"Good-bye," I said stiffly.
At the second sitting I tried to make allowances for the artistic temperament when Wilkinson prowled round me with a look of something like horror on his face, assaulted my features with compasses, and turned away gibbering. I even kept calm when informed that one of my eyes was considerably larger and wider open than the other and that I had "no drawing" in my face. "No offence, old chap," added my former friend with a grin. ”

“ Henry Higgins, professor of phonetics, undertakes for a wager to teach her the manners and diction of a duchess—a smaller achievement, of course, in Mr. Shaw's eyes, but still a step in the right direction. And he is better than his word. After six months she has acquired a mincing speech, from which she is still liable to lapse into appalling indiscretions; but after another six months the product might pass muster in any modiste's showroom. And then she turns on him and protests that he has spoilt her life. As a flower-girl, she tells him, she used to earn her living honestly ”

“ It's better not to keep pounds in your pocket."
"Quite right," I said; "we have now got to four pounds ten."
"And Grandma sent me a pound this morning in a postal-order."
"We're all but up to it now," I said. "The excitement is becoming intense."
"Isn't it? And I've got the rest in shillings and sixpences and coppers."
"Away you go, then, and pay for the bicycle."
"Ah, but it isn't as easy as all that. I can't get the money out of the Post-Office."
"What," I said—"they won't let you have your own money? They calmly take the savings of a lifetime and then refuse to give them up?" ”

“ I go from you to-day a broken man, my confidence shaken, my manners spoiled by the consciousness that my construction is wrong, that there is 'no drawing' in my face, and that neither my eyes nor my nostrils are a pair ”

“ In A Crooked Mile there is one chapter worthy of all three of them—that chapter where Amory discovers that her lover is going away with another woman. That is fine work. For the rest I hope that he will grow tired of his social satire and soon give us again some more of his delicate imagination and fancy.
What I felt about The Girl on the Green (Methuen) was that, however charming and capable, she was not quite likely, after but a few short months of golf, to have put up such a good fight in her great match with the crack amateur, Jim Beverley, who was giving her a half. ”

“ I asked.
"No offence, old chap, but you have such queer facial bones;" and as he turned back to his modelling I heard him mutter: "You never really know what people are like till they sit to you."
Again I felt a bit hurt, and this time I indulged a retort. "Wonder if you'll get Popplewell into the Academy. You've never had anything in yet, have you?"
"We sculptors are so vilely handicapped by the wretched amount of space the Academy people give us!" said Wilkinson angrily. "Still, I've great hopes this time. Not only is my work improved, but it's a popular subject—Popplewell, the novelist. ”

“ My Uncle James, whose memoirs I am now preparing for publication, was a many-sided man; but his chief characteristic, I am inclined to think, was the indomitable resolution with which, disregarding hints, entreaties and even direct abuse, he would lie in bed of a morning. I have seen the domestic staff of his hostess day after day manœuvring restlessly in the passage outside his room, doing all those things which women do who wish to rout a man out of bed without moving Uncle James an inch. Footsteps might patter outside his door; voices might call one to the other ”

“ While then we admit that President Wilson's technical violation of his policy of non-intervention is fraught with possibilities of difficulty if not of actual danger for the United States, we can at least fortify ourselves with the reassuring consolation that, where righteous intentions are backed by a strong arm, the odds are generally in favour of their prevailing, even though they may never be victorious. ”

“ On days when Private Bills come up for consideration, there is a scene which interests while it perplexes occupants of Ladies' Gallery, in whose full view it is set. As soon as Speaker takes the Chair, before galleries are open to male strangers, there enters from hidden staircase leading to gallery over clock a procession of businesslike gentlemen. Silently, swiftly, they flood what is known as Distinguished Strangers' Gallery. ”

“ So now it goes off and on just like any other ring. I took it from her and looked inside.
"There are all sorts of things here too," I said. "Really, you don't seem to have read your wedding-ring at all. Or, anyhow, you've been skipping."
"There's nothing," said Celia in the same mournful voice. "I do think you might have put something,"'
I went and sat on the arm of her chair and held the ring up.
"You're an ungrateful wife," I said, "after all the trouble I took. Now look there," and I pointed with a pencil, "what's the first thing you see?" ”

“ Shaw consented to temper his wisdom to the limitations of its repository. His Alfred Doolittle (father of the flower-girl) threw off a little cheap satire on the morality of the middle-classes, yet admitted the drawbacks of unauthorised union (as practised by himself) , since a man's wife is there to be kicked, whereas a mistress is apt to be more exigent of the amenities; you must adopt a more lover-like attitude if you want to retain her. He also argued brightly in defence of his proposal to sell his own daughter to any man for a fiver ”

“ The milk of human kindness comes surging back into me like a tidal wave. I love my species. Give me a bit of breakfast then, and let me enjoy a quiet meditative smoke, and I am a pleasure to all with whom I come in contact. ”

“ We hear that, as a result of a contemporary drawing attention to Chicago's leniency towards women murderers, ladies whose hobby is homicide are now flocking to that city and it is becoming uncomfortably overcrowded. ”

“ Looking back at what has been achieved, we can gain fresh courage for the perplexities of the moment, in the sure and certain hope that with energy and goodwill the task of social amelioration will be safely accomplished, if never finished. ”

“ Of course, you say, her contact with refined society—"we needs must love the highest when we see it"—has unfitted her for mixing with inferior people. On the contrary. She has, it is true, passed the final test of a series of social functions; but meanwhile all this time of her apprenticeship in manners she has been living her daily life, doing half-menial duties, in the house of Higgins, who happens to have no manners at all. ”

“ I replied, "that I will play with no man who deliberately connives at the slaughter of his fellow-citizens. Every Liberal vote is a vote for civil war."
"Man, this is a golf links, not Hyde Park."
"I regret the course I have to take, but my conscience is imperative. Away! your clubs are blood-stained."
Redford shrugged his shoulders and went off to get the professional to go round with him.
The next man to drop in was Pobson. He is a Grand Knight Imperial (or something similar) of the Primrose League, and makes speeches between the ventriloquist and the step-dancer at their meetings. ”

“ The attitude of Militarist to Pacifist has the makings of a very pretty comedy. When the Mystics (with the Friends and the Tolstoians) were evangelical enough to preach their message of peace even to the point of non-resistance, they were broadly scouted as sentimental and idealistic idiots, and reminded of a nature red in tooth and claw rampant in this most sordid of all possible worlds. ”

“ Mr. Shaw's Pygmalion takes a live flower-girl, turns her into a lifeless wax figure fit for a milliner's shop-window, and flatters himself, as an artist, on the result, but, as a man, proposes to take no interest in it, moral or physical. So you can easily see why almost any other proper name you can think of would have done better for the title.
We venture to suggest a new attitude to illustrate the ease of manner which one expects from a Master of Phonetics and Deportment.
Henry Higgins Sir Herbert Tree. ”

“ Not Mizpahs."
"Right," I said.
For three days I wandered past gold-and-silversmiths with the ring in my pocket ... and for three days Celia went about without a wedding-ring, and, for all I know, without even her marriage-lines in her muff. And on the fourth day I walked boldly in.
"I want," I said, "a wedding-ring engraved," and I felt in my pockets. "Not initials," I said, and I felt in some more pockets, "but—but——" I tried the trousers pockets again. "Well, look here, I'll be quite frank with you. ”

“ Now that the Rationalists take up the case against war from another end, they are denounced as squalid souls, with a greengrocer's outlook, morbidly anxious about the price of peas and potatoes, and urged to remember that not by bread alone doth man live. ”

“ But good wishes are seldom operative unless they are backed by action. It is the duty of every lover of his country to labour unremittingly to promote this object, and at the same time to resign himself to the conviction that he may not live to see his aim realised, though his descendants may witness its translation into actuality, even if its consummation is indefinitely postponed. ”