Status Updates From Scenes from Provincial Life...

"I don't know if I ought to marry her," Robert said. "It would mean being prepared to devote myself to her pretty completely."

I thought he was exaggerating - he had a romantic temperament.

"I think there's a pub up there," she said. I signified that I might be led to it.

"I don't know," said Robert, "if anyone can make her permanently happy." He shook his head, as God might while thinking of the human race.

Over the mantelpiece there was a mural painting whose subject I presumed to be allegorical since the swans appeared to be on an equal footing with the human beings. What interested me most was the smell of the place - I knew it was the long-standing scent of cigars, but had my nose been presented with it in other circumstances I could easily have taken it for a whiff of the stables.

In a church wedding the organ tootles so loudly that even the drunks know when they have to go in and come out.

Chubb finished a very long sentence, whose syntax I cannot vouch for.

It was after I had been finally rejected by My Last One that I had decided in anguish to take anyone who wanted me.

Fixing me with her winking brightness of eye, Julia said in amused, penetrating and ironic, friendly detachment: "There's something slightly feminine about you."

And instantly I said, in just the same way: "And there's something slightly masculine about you."

No offence was either meant or taken, on either side. We just stared at each other, amused and surprised.

"Is that what you wanted to tell me?" I said.

With juvenile desire to have everything cut-and-dried, to see everything as black or white, I had imagined that people who were already married automatically could not make or receive further proposals. How wrong I was !

James was not gifted with a sense of humour, but he was intelligent enough to know that such a thing existed and to work out a sort of substitute.

"Her name is Julia," said Robert.

"What's her other name?" said I, seizing the opportunity to face him with a direct question.

"Łempicki-Czyz" said Robert in a preposterously casual tone.

"What?" echoed Myrtle and I.

I let her go on. The next time I listened she was saying:

"My gun's come."
"Your what?" I was constantly finding it impossible to believe my ears.
"My gun. Didn't I tell you I was getting a gun? It came yesterday."

"What's his real reason? Do you know?"
"How should I know? He tells me so many things."
"Repeat some of them."
"I wasn't supposed to tell you."
"Repeat them all the same."

"I know you're one of the discreetest of men, Joe."

Tom rose to go away, and on this happy, fraudulent note our conversation ended.

Tom had a remarkable talent for turning up at rendezvous I had made with someone else. His instinct for not missing anything amounted to second sight.

Myrtle nodded again. She roused herself sufficiently to make a tragic revelation. "I dream that I'm two people."

Satan entered into me. "Two?" I said. "There's no cause for alarm till it gets to ten."

My landlady was clearing away the remains of my supper, when Myrtle sauntered into the room with an alluring whiff of cosmetics.

Like most people of weak moral fibre he was thoroughly engaging.