Uneasy Money quotes

On one occasion she had kept him waiting so long that he had been able to do nine holes, starting at the Savoy Grill and finishing up near Hammersmith.

His was a simple mind, able to amuse itself with simple things.

Some men in the circumstances in which Lord Dawlish found himself would have fidgeted and looked at their watches; some would have prowled up and down;

All Lord Dawlish’s friends called him Bill, and he had a catholic list of them, ranging from men whose names were in Debrett to men whose names were on the notice boards of obscure clubs in connection with the nonpayment of dues.

He was the sort of man one instinctively calls Bill.

The anti-race-suicide enthusiast with the rubber rings did not call Lord Dawlish Bill, but otherwise his manner was intimate.

I don’t know anything about the game and I should probably run up against some wildcat company. I can’t say I like the directorship wheeze much. It’s the idea of knowing that one’s name would be being used as a bait.

Every time I saw it on a prospectus I should feel like a trout fly.

”

It had been the poor lad’s mistaken view that he could drink up all the alcoholic liquor in America.

It is a curious law of Nature that the most undeserving brothers always have the best sisters.

Thrifty, plodding young men, who get up early, and do it now, and catch the boss’ eye, and save half their salaries, have sisters who never speak civilly to them except when they want to borrow money.

Thrifty, plodding young men, who get up early, and do it now, and catch the boss’ eye, and save half their salaries, have sisters who never speak civilly to them except when they want to borrow money.

To the Claude Nutcombes of the world are vouchsafed the Elizabeths.

The great aim of Elizabeth’s life was to make a new man of Nutty.

It was with a dark foreboding that she returned to the kitchen and turned on one of the taps. For perhaps three seconds a stream of the dimension of a darning needle emerged, then with a sad gurgle the tap relapsed into a stolid inaction.

There is no stolidity so utter as that of a waterless tap.

She passed through the dining room to the foot of the stairs.

and he was no mean performer with the gloves. But we all of us have our limitations, and Bill had his. He was not a good dancer. He was energetic, but he required more elbow room than the ordinary dancing floor provides.

As a dancer, in fact, he closely resembled a Newfoundland puppy trying to run across a field.

It takes a good deal to daunt the New York dancing man, but the invasion of the floor by Bill and the Good Sport undoubtedly caused a profound and even painful sensation.

“Oo-oo, my head does ache!”

“I wish it would burst,” said his sister unkindly.

“That’s a nice thing to say to a fellow!”

“I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have said it—”

“Only I couldn’t think of anything worse.”

It began to seem to Nutty that pathos was a bit of a flivver too. As a last resort he fell back on silence. He wriggled as far down as he could beneath the sheets and breathed in a soft and wounded sort of way.

Nature has decreed that there are certain things in life which shall act as hoops of steel, grappling the souls of the elect together. Golf is one of these; a mutual love of horseflesh another; but the greatest of all is bees.

Between two beekeepers there can be no strife.

Not even a tepid hostility can mar their perfect communion. The petty enmities which life raises to be barriers between man and man and between man and woman vanish, once it is revealed to them that they are linked by this great bond.

She had made up her mind what to do when Dudley Pickering proposed to her next time, and thereby, it seemed to her, had removed all difficulties in the way of that proposal. She little knew her Pickering.

Dudley Pickering was not a self-starter in the motordrome of love. He needed cranking.

He was that most unpromising of matrimonial material, a shy man with a cautious disposition. If he overcame his shyness caution applied the foot brake. If he succeeded in forgetting caution shyness shut off the gas.

Her first glance, however, at the actual theater of war, gave her the impression that matters had advanced beyond the hushing-up stage. A yellow desolation brooded over the kitchen.

It was not so much a kitchen as an omelette.

There were eggs everywhere, from floor to ceiling. She crunched her way in on a carpet of oozing shells.

There was one of those painful pauses.

Nutty looked at the monkey, rather like an elongated Macbeth inspecting the ghost of Banquo.

The monkey looked at Nutty. The pause continued. Nutty shut his eyes, counted ten slowly and opened them. The monkey was still there. “Boo!” said Nutty in an apprehensive undertone.

She seemed so far away that he wondered how she could ever have affected him for pain or pleasure. He looked at her across a chasm.

This is the real difference between love and infatuation, that infatuation can be slain cleanly with a single blow.

In the hour of clear vision which had come to him Bill saw that he had never loved Claire. It was her beauty that had held him, that and the appeal which her circumstances had made to his pity.

Boyhood, like measles, is one of those complaints which a man should catch young and have done with, for when it comes in middle life it is apt to be serious.

Dudley Pickering had escaped boyhood at the time when his contemporaries were contracting it.

“You do seem to have read the most horrible sort of books.”

“I rather like a bit of blood with my fiction,” said Bill.

“What about this piano scheme?”

He tried to, but failed. Every virtue in Elizabeth seemed to call up the recollection of a corresponding defect in Claire. It became almost mathematical. Elizabeth was so straight—on the level, they called it over here.

Claire was a corkscrew among women.

Elizabeth was sunny and cheerful. Querulousness was Claire’s besetting sin. Elizabeth was such a pal. Claire had never been that.

Pickering’s society was not for the time being entertaining. He had answered with grunts the press agent’s kindly attempts at conversation, and the latter had withdrawn to seek a more congenial audience. And now Mr. Pickering was alone, talking things over with his subconscious self.

A man’s subconscious self is not the ideal companion.

It lurks for the greater part of his life in some dark den of its own, hidden away, and emerges only to taunt and deride and increase the misery of a miserable hour. Mr.

Her face glowed with a wonderful color and her eyes were very bright. Mr. Pickering met her gaze, and strange things began to happen to his mind, that mind which a moment before had thought so clearly and established so definite a point of view.

What a gelatin-backboned thing is man, who prides himself on his clear reason and becomes as wet blotting-paper at one glance from bright eyes!

A moment before, Mr. Pickering had thought out the whole subject of woman and marriage in a few bold flashes of his capable brain, and thanked Providence that he was not as those men who take unto themselves wives to their undoing.

Elizabeth met him in the passage.

At the age of eleven or thereabouts women acquire a poise and an ability to handle difficult situations which a man, if he is lucky, manages to achieve somewhere in the later seventies.

Except for a pallor strange to her face, and a drawn look about the eyes, there was nothing to show that all was not for the best with Elizabeth in a best of all possible worlds.

He had the feeling of having been hit by something.

A man has not a woman’s gift of being able to transfer his mind at will from sorrow to socks.

“Like sieves!” She sighed. A troubled frown wrinkled her forehead. “Men are so helpless! Oh, dear, I’m sure you don’t pay any attention to anything important. I don’t believe you ever bother your head about keeping warm in winter and not getting your feet wet.

“You can’t. And there you have put in two words just what I’ve been trying to make clear all the time. Don’t you see that that’s the terrible thing about life, that nobody can do more than tell anybody anything?

Life’s nothing but words, words, words, and how are we to know when words are true?

How am I to know that you didn’t ask me to marry you out of sheer pity and an exaggerated sense of justice?”

Just at this moment, while we’re talking here, there’s something stronger than reason which tells me you really do love me. But can’t you understand that that won’t last?

It’s like a candle burning on a rock with the tide coming up all round it.

It’s burning brightly enough now, and we can see the truth by the light of it. But the tide will put it out, and then we shall have nothing left to see by.

And yet now, at the one moment of her life when everything depended on her acting sensibly, she had behaved in a way that made his head swim when he thought of it. What it amounted to was that you simply couldn’t understand women.

Nobody home! There you had Woman in a nutshell.

Into this tangle of silent sorrow came a honking automobile. It drew up at the gate and a man jumped out.