I may as well tell you, here and now, that if you are going about the place thinking things pretty, you will never make a modern poet. Be poignant, man, be poignant!

I don't know if you know it, J.B., but you're the sort of fellow who causes hundreds to fall under suspicion when he's found stabbed in his library with a paper-knife of Oriental design.

It ought to be a criminal offence for women to dye their hair. Especially red. What the devil do women do that sort of thing for?

What I'm worrying about is what Tom is going to say when he starts talking." "Uncle Tom?" "I wish there was something else you could call him except 'Uncle Tom,' " Aunt Dahlia said a little testily. "Every time you do it, I expect to see him turn black and start playing the banjo.

It looked something like a pen wiper and something like a piece of hearth-rug. A second and keener inspection revealed it as a Pekinese puppy.

Providence seems to look after the chumps of this world; and, personally, I'm all for it.

I don't want to wrong anybody, so I won't go so far as to say that she actually wrote poetry, but her conversation, to my mind, was of a nature calculated to excite the liveliest of suspicions. Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don't sometimes feel that the stars are God's daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.