The Weed That Strings the Hangman's Bag (Flavia de Luce, #2)

by Alan Bradley

“I don’t smoke,” I managed. “And why is that?” she asked. “Too young or too wise?” “I was thinking of taking it up next week,” I said lamely. “I just hadn’t actually got round to it yet.”

I have to admit, though, that Cynthia was a great organizer, but then, so were the men with whips who got the pyramids built.

“This is the second movement, now, andante con moto,” he was saying loudly. Father always called out the names of the movements in a voice that was better suited to the drill hall than to the drawing room. “Means ‘at a walking pace, with motion,’” he added, settling back in his chair as if, for the time being, he’d done his duty. It seemed redundant to me: How could you have a walking pace without motion? It defied the laws of physics, but then, composers are not like the rest of us. Most of them, for instance, are dead.

“Children ought to be horsewhipped,” she used to say, “unless they are going in for politics or the Bar, in which case they ought in addition to be drowned.”

You English are all such perfect gentlemen—even the ladies!”

We seem to be born with wisps of both glory and gloom in our veins, and we can never be certain at any given moment which of the two is driving us.

Seen from the air, the male mind must look rather like the canals of Europe, with ideas being towed along well-worn towpaths by heavy-footed dray horses. There is never any doubt that they will, despite wind and weather, reach their destinations by following a simple series of connected lines. But the female mind, even in my limited experience, seems more of a vast and teeming swamp, but a swamp that knows in an instant whenever a stranger—even miles away—has so much as dipped a single toe into her waters. People who talk about this phenomenon, most of whom know nothing whatsoever about it, call it “woman’s intuition.”

(my old friend chloral hydrate, I noted: C2H3Cl3O2—a powerful hypnotic that when slipped in alcohol to American thugs was called a “Mickey Finn.” In England, it was slipped to high-strung housewives by country doctors and called “something to help you sleep.”).

Brains and morals have nothing to do with one another.