The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.

There was something alike terrifying and piteous in the spectacle of these frail old morsels of humanity consecrating their last flickering energies to the task of making each other wretched. Hatred seemed to be the one faculty which had survived in undiminished vigor where all else was dropping into ordered and symmetrical decay.

There may have been disillusionments in the lives of the medieval saints, but they would scarcely have been better pleased if they could have foreseen that their names would be associated nowadays chiefly with racehorses and the cheaper clarets.

It is one of the consolations of middle aged reformers that the good that they inculcate must live after them if it is to live at all.

Mother, may I go and maffick, Tear around and hinder traffic?

The cat of the slums and alleys, starved, outcast, harried, still keeps amid the prowlings of its adversity the bold, free, panther-tread with which it paced of yore the temple courts of Thebes, still displays the self-reliant watchfulness which man has never taught it to lay aside.

But, good gracious, you've got to educate him first. You can't expect a boy to be vicious till he's been to a good school.