The Documents in the Case quotes

I said that with two million extra women in this country it didn’t seem possible, certainly, for everybody to get married, and he smiled and said:

“My dear Miss Milsom, half my patients come to me because they are not married⁠—and the other half because they are!”

We had quite a laugh about it.

Harrison, I do sometimes wish that she was just a little more practical. If anything at all is left to her to do, she is so apt to lose herself in a book or a daydream and forget all about it.

She always says she ought to have been born to ten thousand a year⁠—but who of us could not say that?

I always feel myself that I was really meant to “sit on a cushion and sew a fine seam”—you remember the games we used to play about being princesses in the Arabian Nights, with a train of a hundred black slaves, carrying alabaster bowls filled …

“All right, my dear, I’ll be up in a minute.” His eyes were unhappy.

There’s something wrong in this house⁠—something more than a little misunderstanding about dinner time.

I shouldn’t wonder if she gives this man a devil of a time—probably without meaning it, that’s the rub.

But I don’t altogether see that. He couldn’t be supposed to know, and anyhow, what is the good of giving a person a lavish display of affection with one hand and rubbing pepper into his eyes with the other?

Oh, Bungie, it’s the silly little things of life that I’m afraid of.

Don’t they frighten you, too, competent as you are?

“The great humility of science, in face of the infinite and valuable variety of Truth.” Isn’t that an exquisite Victorian remark?

“We should pray,” said he, making me feel like a very grubby fourth-form infant, “to be delivered from cleverness, because very clever people end by finding that nothing is worth while.”

So I said, rather ungraciously, that probably nothing was worth while, and he gave the funniest twinkle from under his thick eyebrows and replied: “You must not think that, or you will become a bore.”

So I said, rather ungraciously, that probably nothing was worth while, and he gave the funniest twinkle from under his thick eyebrows and replied:

“You must not think that, or you will become a bore.”

My parson turns out to be rather an enlightened person. It appears he took a mathematical tripos among other things, which is one up to him.

Anthony’s College of Medicine, and I suppose one of these days he will muddle though his hospital work and be turned out as a genial G.P.—“Dr. Leader is such a nice, cheerful man; he makes you feel better the minute he comes into the room.”

I hate cheerful people.

Still, he and Jimmy will amuse one another, and we shall have a chance to get off on our own a bit.

It’s overdone, isn’t it, Lathom?” Lathom, quite helpless with rage, says in a strangulated voice, that he thinks it’s just right. “Well, you’re not eating it,” says Harrison, gloomily triumphant. By this time everybody’s appetite is taken thoroughly away.

There is nothing on earth the matter with the chicken, but we all sit staring at it as though it was a Harpagus-feast of boiled baby.

Well, I’ll spare you the rest of the nightmare. The point is that this time, Mrs.

Love makes no difference.

Harrison would cheerfully die for his wife⁠—but I can’t imagine anything more offensive than dying for a person after you’ve been rude to them.

It’s taking a mean advantage. And what’s the good of it all to him, if he loves her so much that everything she says gets on his nerves?

His change of mind was a chivalrous rush to her defence. I was pleased with myself at the time, I remember; I suppose my lighthearted diplomacy was about as disastrous as diplomacy usually is.

What devilish things we do when we try to be clever.

After all, Harrison probably understood his wife only too well, but he could not bear that anyone should suspect the clay of his idol. He destroyed himself rather than let her down.

In fact, it is only when we contemplate the loves of unpleasant people that we see the indecency of passion. It is disgusting to think of the amorous transports of, let us say, Mr. Pecksniff.

Grotesque characters only exist for us from the waist upwards.

“I suppose,” I went on, “it didn’t occur to you to mention that you were not me?”

It was all so damned unjust. The man was not fit to live. He deserved to be murdered for his rotten paintings, let alone for his cruelty to his wife. And to think that his revolting hands should have the right …

It is so very odd that in moments of excitement we should all talk like characters in a penny novelette.

However long one lives, I suppose it always strikes one with the same shock of surprise.

Sometimes I wonder whether he was deceived. I thought at the time that he was, but perhaps the light of faith in his eyes was really the torch of martyrdom.

It is fine to die for a faith, but perhaps it is still finer to die for a thing you do not believe in.

I do not know. He baffled me. If the garrison was disarmed and beaten behind that impenetrable façade, I was never to know it. Nobody would ever know it.

Aren’t you afraid he’ll poison himself sometimes with those queer toadstools and things?” And I smile and say, “Oh, but my husband would never make a stupid mistake. He knows so much about them, you see.” That’s quite true, too.

He doesn’t make mistakes about things⁠—only about people.

He never gets anything right about me—not one single thing. But then he really cares about mushrooms and takes trouble to study them.

He’s glad, I think, because he always used to grumble at any demonstration and say, “That’ll do, that’ll do”—though he’ll let the cat swarm all over him and knead bread on his chest for hours together.

I suppose he thinks a woman’s feelings don’t matter as much as a cat’s!

But I don’t know why I bother about him at all, when you, you, you are the one thing filling my heart. Oh, my darling, my Petra, my heart’s heart! You are coming back. Nothing else is of importance in the whole world.

Being used to Lathom, I ignored his irritability. We jolted off.

The taxi had a churchyard smell about it, and I mentioned the fact.

Lathom slammed the window down with an impatient grunt. I remarked, foolishly, that he didn’t seem very enthusiastic about the trip. He said:

He did not reply, and I suddenly became aware that I could hear him breathing.

Once I had noticed it, I couldn’t seem to shut my ears to the sound.

It was like hearing your own heartbeats in the night—when they seem to grow louder and louder, till they fill the silence and keep you from going to sleep. The breaths seemed quite to rasp my ear, they were so heavy and so close.

We surround death with such a lot of hypocrisy and formality. It ought to be made just simple and beautiful, like the leaves falling. I shall have to order mourning and a widow’s veil—think of wearing black clothes when one is happy.

I should like a robe made of the rainbow⁠—I’m wearing it in my heart, darling⁠—all for you!

Write quickly, dearest, and tell me what to do. And tell me that you are as glad as I am and that you love me, love me, love me as I love you!

“Blackmail!

Nobody ain’t goin’ to charge theirselves with murder, and don’t you think it.

”

Come now, you have called me a man of the world.

Murders are done every day, for much less motive than Lathom had.

”

“Of course not. It is the real stuff. I don’t think we’ve got any of the natural muscarine about the place, or you’d see. But there’s no difference at all, really.

Nature’s only a rather clumsy kind of chemist, don’t you see.

You’re a chemical laboratory; your body, I mean—so am I—so’s everybody—only rather a careless and inaccurate one, and given to producing unnecessary flourishes and ornaments, like your face, or toadstools. There’s no need to make a toadstool when you want to produce muscarine.

I have that kind of vaguely inquiring mind that likes to be told what is going on, even though I could not be troubled to make a single experiment myself, and should not have the vaguest idea what experiment to make.

A pap-fed, negative, twentieth-century mind, open on all sides and windswept by every passing gust.

Elizabeth thought that a chat with a bunch of scientific men would do me good. We need not, she said, mention the Harrisons.

“Why should it be?” said Matthews. “

Nature does not work by a scheme of poetical justice.

”