They Do It With Mirrors (Miss Marple, #5)

by Agatha Christie

he’s bitten by that same bug of wanting to improve everybody’s lives for them. And really, you know, nobody can do that but yourself.”

There Lewis and Carrie Louise are, living there, surrounded by these boys—who aren’t perhaps quite normal. And the place stiff with occupational therapists and teachers and enthusiasts, half of them quite mad. Cranks, all the lot of them, and my little Carrie Louise in the middle of it all!”

Soon, I expect, the fashionable thing to do will be not to educate your children, preserve their illiteracy carefully until they’re eighteen. Anyway

I don’t want a job feeding candy to gangster kids and helping them play at kids’ games …

This place makes me feel I’m tangled up in a spider’s web.

Lewis thinks of nothing but these horrible young criminals. And Mother thinks of nothing but him.

Everything Lewis does is right.

Soft, that’s what the world is nowadays!”

“We’re all mad, dear lady,” he said as he ushered her in through the door. “That’s the secret of existence. We’re all a little mad.”

But people don’t really need a cause for feeling what they do feel. They’re just made that way.

“Like conjurers,” Miss Marple murmured vaguely. “They do it with mirrors is, I believe, the slang phrase.”

“That little rat,