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

I believe I once considerably scandalized her by declaring that clear soup was a more important factor in life than a clear conscience.

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.

I think oysters are more beautiful than any religion,' he resumed presently. 'They not only forgive our unkindness to them; they justify it, they incite us to go on being perfectly horrid to them. Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.

The cook was a good cook, as cooks go; and as cooks go, she went.

The man is a common murderer. A common murderer, possible, but a very uncommon cook.

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.