The life of a journalist is poor, nasty, brutish, and short. So is his style

Flora sighed. It was curious that persons who lived what the novelists called a rich emotional life always seemed to be a bit slow on the uptake.

She liked Victorian novels. They were the only kind of novel you could read while eating an apple.

There are some things (like first love and one’s first reviews) at which a woman in her middle years does not care to look too closely.

I saw something nasty in the woodshed.

A straight nose is a great help if one wishes to look serious'.

Here was an occasion, she thought, for indulging in that deliberate rudeness which only persons with habitually good manners have the right to commit.