“The camel is old—horribly, mustily old—and it is difficult to conceive that it has ever been anything else.”

“‘I laid a trap for you; I told you that I had never met Mrs. Saltpen-Jago. As a matter of fact I met her at lunch on Monday last. She is a pronounced blonde.’”

“‘It seems there is just one way out of the tangle. He’s inclined to be amorous.’”

“‘We can’t keep shifting Mr. Chermbacon backwards and forwards as though he was the regulator of an erratic clock.’”

“‘As your mother says, you are a mass of selfishness.’”

“Yealmton and his wife waged a politely reticent warfare; it was a struggle which Thirza knew she must ultimately win, because she was fighting for existence.”

“How long would she struggle in those unfathomed weed-grown depths before she lay as picturesquely still as the drowned heroine of her tale-weavings?”

“In Burma it is possible to be a politician without ceasing to be a philosopher.”

“Most of those terms are probably wrong, but a little inaccuracy sometimes saves tons of explanation.”

“To the average modern Russian a desire to visit Pskoff is an inexplicable mental freak on the part of a foreigner who wishes to see something of the country he is living in.”