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

A woman who takes her husband about with her everywhere is like a cat that goes on playing with a mouse long after she's killed it.

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.

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.

To be clever in the afternoon argues that one is dining nowhere in the evening.

He's simply got the instinct for being unhappy highly developed.

Romance at short notice was her speciality.