What a girl! He had never in his life before met a woman who could write a letter without a postscript, and this was but the smallest of her unusual gifts.
"I have never heard of Brooklyn." "You've heard of New York?" "Certainly." "New York's one of the outlying suburbs."
The gift of hiding private emotion and keeping up appearances before strangers is not, as many suppose, entirely a product of our modern civilization. Centuries before we were born or thought of there was a widely press-agented boy in Sparta who even went so far as to let a fox gnaw his tender young stomach without permitting the discomfort inseparable from such a proceeding to interfere with either his facial expression or his flow of small talk. Historians have hadned it down that, even in the later stages of the meal, the polite lad continued to be the life and soul of the party...Of all the qualities which belong exclusively to Man and are not shared by the lower animals, this surely is the one which marks him off most sharply from the beasts of the field.
(Of Lord Marshmoreton about to impose himself against his overbearing sister) It was the look which Ajax had in his eyes when he defied the lightning...The Spartan boy is related by Plutarch (Moralia, Apothegmata Laconica 35). The Ajax is the lesser one of Aeneid 1 fame. These just show the thorough grounding of Wodehouse in the Classics.
*I should add a note on the problems of the Kindle: (1) I cannot refer to page numbers. (2) Bookmarks have a tendency to float from page to page.
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