The Melody of Death quotes

“I should be most happy,” said Wallis, with a helpless shrug, “but how can I turn King’s evidence about a matter on which I am absolutely uninformed? The reward is monstrously tempting. If I had companions in crime I should need very little persuading.

My conscience is a matter of constant adjustment. It is rather like the foot-rule which shoemakers employ to measure their customers’ feet⁠—terrifically adjustable.

It has a sliding scale which goes up and down.”

Edith made no reply. It was useless to argue with her mother.

Mrs. Cathcart had a quality which is by no means rare in the total of human possessions, the quality of putting other people in the wrong.

“I am more sorry,” Mrs. Cathcart resumed, “because I am not in a position to give you your necklace.”

He had renamed the country mansion he had purchased twenty years before: it was now known from one end of the country to the other as The Residency, and here he maintained an almost feudal state.

His enemies said that he kept his battalion of servants at full strength so that he might always have somebody handy to swear at, but that was obviously spite.

It was said, too, that every year a fresh firm of solicitors acted for him, and it is certain that he changed his banks with extraordinary rapidity.

“Why, he was his uncle’s heir for about ten minutes.”

“Everybody is old Standerton’s heir for ten minutes,” he said.

“I verily believe he has endowed every hospital, every dogs’ home, every cats’ home, every freakish institution that the world has ever heard of, in the course of the last twenty years, and he is making another will today.”

He was used to lawyers.

He had had every variety, and had divided them into two distinct classes⁠—they were either rogues or fools.

There was no intermediate stage with this old man, and he had no doubt in his mind that Jack Frankfort, a shrewd-looking young man, was to be classed in the former category. He bullied him into a seat.

“What is your breakfast hour?”

“The same hour as every other civilised human being,” snapped the General “at twenty-five minutes to one. What time do you breakfast, for Heaven’s sake?”

“At twenty to one,” said Jack sweetly, and was pleased with himself all the way back to the hotel.

He was delighted with her, and found her a charming companion. Edith Standerton exerted herself to please him.

She had a style of treating people older than herself in such a way as to suggest that she was as young as they.

I do not know any other phrase which would more exactly convey my meaning than that. She had a charm which appealed to this wayward old man.

He brightened up at the thought.

He had reached the stage in life when sleeping in any other room than that to which he was accustomed represented a form of heroism.

After the dinner was through they made their way to the drawing-room.

It was an excellent suggestion, and one that she accepted with pleasure. She was the only lady of the party, and remarked on the fact as she went upstairs with Sir John.

“I always regard a doctor as a fit chaperone for any lady,” he said with a chuckle⁠—it amused him.

Later he found the complement of the joke, and discoursed loudly upon old women of all professions, a discourse which was arrested by the arrival of the Doctor and Jack Frankfort.