He cowered before Aunt Dahlia like a wet sock.
She gave a sort of despairing gesture, like a vicar's daughter
who has discovered
Erastianism in the village.
His manner had nothing in it of the jolly innkeeper of old-fashioned
comic opera. He looked more like Macbeth seeing a couple of
Banquos.
She was a woman capable of checking a charging rhinoceros
with a raised eyebrow and a well-bred stare, but she had her
softer side.
The valet withdrew like a duke leaving the Royal Presence, not
actually walking backwards but giving the impression of doing so.
Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were
a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.
It was a poetic drama, and the audience, though loath to do
anybody an injustice, was beginning to suspect that it was
written in blank verse.
Like so many infants of tender years he presented to the eye
the aspect of a mass murderer suffering from an ingrowing
toenail.
Except for an occasional lecture by the vicar on his holiday in
the Holy Land, illustrated by lantern slides, there was not a great
deal of night-life in Dovetail Hammer.
Market Snodsbury is mostly chapel folk with a moral code that
would have struck Torquemada as too rigid.
Bridmouth-on-Sea is notorious for its invigorating air. Corpses
at Bridmouth-on-Sea leap from their biers and dance round the
maypole.
To attract attention in the dining room of the Senior Conservative
Club between the hours of one and one-thirty, you have to be
a mutton chop, not an earl.
The Aberdeen terrier gave me an unpleasant look and said
something under his breath in Gaelic.
He tottered blindly towards the bar like a camel making for an
oasis after a hard day at the office.
I always say that if you've seen one Gentleman of the Press
having delerium tremens, you've seen them all.
A frightful little weed who sings alto in the choir and for the privilege
of kicking whose trouser-seat the better element fight like wolves.
Honoria Glossop is one of those robust, dynamic girls with the
muscles of a welterweight and a laugh like a squadron of
cavalry charging over a tin bridge.
A melancholy-looking man, he had the appearance of one who
has searched for the leak in life's gas-pipe with a lighted candle.
Hash looked like one who has drained the four-ale of life and
found a dead mouse at the bottom of the pewter.
A curious gulping noise not unlike a bulldog trying to swallow
half a cutlet in a hurry so as to be ready for the other half.
Lady Malvern fitted into my biggest arm-chair as if it had been
built round her by someone who knew they were wearing
armchairs tight round the hips that season.
She looked like something that might have occurred to Ibsen in
one of his less frivolous moments.
The drowsy stillness of the summer afternoon was shattered by
what sounded to his strained senses like G. K. Chesterton
falling on a sheet of tin.
With a gesture such as Job might have made on discovering
a new boil, he crossed to the window and stood looking moodily
out.
I haven't felt so relieved since the afternoon in West Africa when
a rhinocerous, charging at me with flashing eyes, suddenly
sprained an ankle and had to call the whole thing off.
