Crocodile on the Sandbank (Amelia Peabody, #1)

by Elizabeth Peters

I assure you, I have yet to meet a man as sensible as myself!”

“I do not doubt that it is too late to awaken in you any faint sense of Christian compassion or normal human emotion, so I shan’t try. Take yourself away, madame, and this—I can hardly say ‘gentleman’—this male person with you.”

I could not endure a man who would let himself be ruled by me, and I would not endure a man who tried to rule me.

But the dust! And the clutter! My housewifely and scholarly instincts were equally offended.

“And you, sir, are the lordly British male at his loudest and most bad-mannered. If the English gentlewoman is covering the earth, it is in the hope of counteracting some of the mischief her lord and master has perpetrated. Swaggering, loud, certain of his own superiority…”

“Oh,” he said, glancing at me. “So it’s you, Peabody. Of course. Who else would greet a man by beating him over the head?”

Then Peabody had better retire to her bed; she is clearly in need of recuperative sleep; she has not made a sarcastic remark for fully ten minutes.”