The Middle of Things quotes

“My dear aunt!” he said half-teasingly, half-seriously. “You’re worse than a drug-taker. Whatever makes a highly-respectable, shrewd old lady like you cherish such an insensate fancy for this sort of stuff?”

“Stuff?” demanded Miss Penkridge, who had resumed her knitting. “Pooh! It’s not stuff⁠—it’s life! Real life⁠—in the form of fiction!”

Viner shook his head, pityingly. He never read fiction for his own amusement; his tastes in reading lay elsewhere, in solid directions.

And that wasn’t in a novel!” concluded Miss Penkridge triumphantly. “

Novels⁠—Improbability⁠—pooh! Judged by what some people can tell of life, the novel that’s improbable hasn’t yet been written!

”

“You may yet,” replied Miss Penkridge. “But when anybody says to me of a novel that it’s impossible and far-fetched and so on, I’m always inclined to remind him of the old adage.

For you can take it from me, Richard, that truth is stranger than fiction, and that life’s full of queer things.

Only, as you say, we don’t all come across the strange things.”

The doors were set flush with the walls—Viner, who often walked through that passage at night, and who had something of a whimsical fancy, had thought more than once that after nightfall the doors looked as if they had never been opened, never shut.

There was an air of queer, cloistral or prisonlike security in their very look.

They were all shut now, as he paced down the passage, as lonely a place at that hour as you could find in all London. It was queer, he reflected, that he scarcely ever remembered meeting anybody in that passage.

He lifted it to his lips, wondering whatever it was that made his mouth feel so dry. And when he had taken a big gulp, and then spoke, his voice—to himself—sounded just as queer as his tongue had been feeling.

“You were right!” he said suddenly. “There are queerer, stranger affairs in life than one fancies! And I⁠—I’ve been pitchforked⁠—thrown⁠—clean into the middle of things! I!”

Miss Penkridge came closer to him, staring. She looked from him to the glass, from the glass to him.

“And that, ma’am?” asked Mr. Pawle, who evidently admired Miss Penkridge’s shrewd observations, “that is what, now?”

“Money!” said Miss Penkridge. “Money!”

The old solicitor went away, promising to get to work on the lines suggested by Miss Penkridge, and next day he telephoned to Viner asking him to go down to his offices in Bedford Row. Viner hurried off, and on arriving found Mr.

“No,” said Fosdick emphatically, “wiser! The man had a secret, affecting powerful interests.

Many a man’s been put away for having a secret.

”

“I’ve no inkling, ma’am; I’ve no inkling!” said Mr. Pawle. “You wondered—”

“I wondered,” murmured Mrs. Summers, bending closer to her listeners, “if the man who called himself John Ashton wasn’t in reality the long-lost Lord Marketstoke.”

Eh?”

“In plain language,” said Mr. Pawle, “he wanted to be bought.”

“Precisely!” agreed Mr. Carless. “Of course, Methley and Woodlesford didn’t quite put it in that light. They put it that their client had no wish to disturb his nephew, but suggested, kindly, that his nephew should make him a proper payment out of his abundance.”