Many persons read and like fiction. It does not tax the intelligence and the intelligence of most of us can so ill afford taxation that we rightly welcome any reading matter which avoids this.

Publishers of course have you altogether in their grip; if they say you must do a thing you have jolly well got to do it.

It was a book to kill time for those who liked it better dead.

A hot bath! How exquisite a vespertine pleasure, how luxurious, fervid and flagrant a consolation for the rigours, the austerities, the renunciations of the day.

the position of women, that sad and well-nigh universal blot on civilizations, was never far from her mind.

One never feels such distaste for one's countrymen and countrywomen as when one meets them abroad.

It wasn't really touching to be young; it was touching not to be young, because you had less of life left. Touching to be thirty; more touching to be forty; tragic to be fifty; and heartbreaking to be sixty. As to seventy, as to eighty, one would feel as one did during the last dance of a ball, tired but fey in the paling dawn, desperately making the most of each bar of music before one went home to bed.