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A month later, such is the magic of perseverance, his audience had narrowed down
It is in the Spring that the ache for the Larger Life comes upon us, and this was a particularly mellow Spring morning. It was the sort of morning when the air gives us a feeling of anticipation, a feeling that, on a day like this, things surely cannot go joggling along in the same dull old groove, a premonition that something romantic and exciting is about to happen to us.
Never before had he been so completely certain that he was sick to death of the rut into which he had fallen.
‘How do you know it’s your only means of making a living? Why don’t you try some thing new?’ ‘Such as—?’ ‘How should I know? Anything that comes along.
Don’t get into a groove. Be an adventurer. Snatch at the next chance, whatever it is.’
‘Oh, well, I keep on trying. I’m twenty-three, and I haven’t achieved anything much yet, but I certainly don’t feel like sitting back and calling myself a failure.’
‘It’s the Spring.’ ‘I suppose it is. I feel like doing something big and adventurous.’
To Lord Emsworth the park and gardens of Blandings were the nearest earthly approach to Paradise.
Other people worried about all sorts of things – strikes, wars, suffragettes, diminishing birth-rates, the growing materialism of the age, and a score of similar subjects. Worrying, indeed, seemed to be the twentieth century’s specialty.
Nature had equipped him with a mind so admirably constructed for withstanding the disagreeablenesses of life that, if an unpleasant thought entered it, it passed out again a moment later.
He never experienced the thrill of ambition fulfilled, but, on the other hand, he never knew the agony of ambition frustrated.
There are men in this world who cannot rest, who are so constituted that they can only take their leisure in the shape of a change of work.
His hobby was avoiding hobbies and attending to business.
Collecting, as Mr Peters did it, resembles the drink habit. It begins as an amusement, and ends as an obsession.
A curious species of mutual toleration
when the providence which looks after all good men
Lord Emsworth was fond of trees, he looked at these approvingly.
Simpson’s in the Strand is unique. Here, if he wishes, the Briton may, for the small sum of half a dollar, stupefy himself with food. The God of Fatted Plenty has the place under his protection. Its keynote is solid comfort. Country clergymen, visiting London for the annual Clerical Congress, come here to get the one square meal which will last them till next year’s Clerical Congress. Fathers and uncles with sons or nephews on their hands rally to Simpson’s with silent blessings on the head of the genius who founded the place, for here only can the young boa-constrictor really fill himself at
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Existence for the Hon. Freddie was simply a sort of desert punctuated with monthly oases in the shape of new Quayle adventures.
experience, even if it does not harden, erects a defensive barrier between its children and the world.
The struggling life breeds moods of depression,
Life, at that moment, had seemed to stretch before her like a dusty, weary road, without hope. She was sick of fighting.
Fate has battered out of them every trace of individuality. Each now is exactly like his neighbour, no worse, no better.
he had definitely come to the conclusion that the life adventurous was the life for him. He had frequently suspected this to be the case, but it had required the actual experiment to bring certainty. Almost more than physical courage the ideal adventurer needs a certain lively inquisitiveness, the quality of not being content to mind his own affairs;
The modern young man may do adventurous things if they are thrust upon him, but, left to himself, he will edge away uncomfortably and look in the other direction when the Goddess of Adventure smiles at him. Training and tradition alike pluck at his sleeve and urge him not to risk making himself ridiculous. And from sheer horror of laying himself open to the charge of not minding his own business he falls into a stolid disregard of all that is out of the ordinary and exciting.
It is curious how frequently in this world our attempts to stimulate and uplift swoop back on us and smite us like boomerangs.
But, illogically, she found herself feeling a little hostile.
That was the spirit she liked and admired, that reckless acceptance of whatever might come.
Mercy I asked, mercy I found.’
Beach, accordingly, had acquired a dignified inertia which almost qualified him for inclusion in the vegetable kingdom.
One can manage the business well enough; it is the dialogue which provides the pitfalls.
AMONG THE COMPENSATIONS of advancing age is a wholesome pessimism, which, while it takes the fine edge off whatever triumphs may come to us, has the admirable effect of preventing Fate from working off on us any of those gold bricks, coins with strings attached, and unhatched chickens at which Ardent Youth snatches with such enthusiasm, to its subsequent disappointment. As we emerge from the twenties we grow into a habit of mind which looks askance at Fate bearing gifts. We miss, perhaps, the occasional prize, but we also avoid leaping light-heartedly into traps.
Life had taken on the quality of a dream, in which anything might happen, and in which everything which did happen was to be accepted with the calmness natural in dreams.
It is the penalty of the suspicious type of mind that it suffers from its own activity.
After all, what could be pleasanter than a little literature in the small hours?
‘You’re wonderful!’ ‘Because I saw through you?’ ‘Partly that. But chiefly because you had the pluck to undertake a thing like this.’ ‘You undertook it.’ ‘But I’m a man.’ ‘And I’m a woman! And my theory is, Mr Marson, that a woman can do nearly everything better than a man. What a splendid test-case this would make to settle the Votes for Women question once and for all! Here we are, you and I, a man and a woman, each trying for the same thing, and each starting with equal chances. Suppose I beat you? How about the inferiority of women then?’ ‘I never said that women were inferior.’ ‘You did
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‘That’s simply your old-fashioned masculine attitude towards the female, Mr Marson. You look on woman as a weak creature to be shielded and petted. We aren’t anything of the sort. We’re terrors. We’re as hard as nails. We’re awful creatures. You mustn’t let my sex interfere with your trying to get this reward. Think of me as if I were another man. We’re up against each other in a fair fight, and I don’t want any special privileges. If you don’t do your best from now onwards, I shall never forgive you. Do you understand?’
I won’t take favours just because I happen to be a female.
that appearance of resignation to an enforced idleness and a monotony only to be broken by meals.
‘And when you’ve said that, you’ve said everything. You can’t live on scenery and architecture for the rest of your life. There’s the human element to be thought of. And you’re beginning—
The heart does not stand still. Whatever the emotions of its owner, it goes on beating.
AS WE GROW older and realize more clearly the limitations of human happiness, we come to see that the only real and abiding pleasure in life is to give pleasure to other people.
The Hall had that Sunday morning air of wanting to be left to itself and disapproving of the entry of anything human till lunch time,
A man may be in sympathy with the modern movement for the emancipation of Woman, and yet feel aggrieved when a mere girl proves herself a more efficient thief than he. Woman is invading Man’s sphere more successfully every day, but there are still certain fields in which Man may consider that he is rightfully entitled to a monopoly,
As a rule something had to go very definitely wrong to make her depressed, for she was not a girl who brooded easily on the vague undercurrent of sadness in Life. As a rule she found nothing tragic in the fact that she was alive. She liked being alive.
It was a silence pregnant with thought.
A drawback to success in life is that failure, when it does come, acquires an exaggerated importance.
He saw it as the prize of a contest between his will and that of whatever malignant powers there might be ranged against him in the effort to show him that there were limits to what he could achieve.
He was suffering from that form of paranoia which makes men multi-millionaires. Nobody would be foolish enough to become a multi-millionaire, if it were not for the desire to prove himself irresistible.
