"The Chronicles of Clovis"

[fiefoe]

Saki's short stories make excellent bedtime reading. People don't seem to spin yarns like this anymore.

• I am perfectly certain that at the Last Judgment Constance will ask more questions than any of the examining Seraphs.
• She was looking more than ever like an albino beetroot.
• An escaped hyaena would have mounted up to something on the scale of a Government grant.
• Once they arrive at the supper-table they seem to enter thoroughly into the spirit of the thing. There's nothing in Christianity or Buddhism that quite matches the sympathetic unselfishness of an oyster.
• "You evidently think that brevity is the soul of widowhood."
• "You can go and experiment on the shorthorns at the farm, who are under proper control," said Mrs. Cornett, "or the elephants at the Zoological Gardens. They're said to be highly intelligent, and they have this recommendation, that they don't come creeping about our bedrooms and under chairs, and so forth."
• In the first place, he particularly wanted to teach the MacGregor boys, who could well afford the knowledge, how to play poker-patience.
• They instantly stiffened into a demeanour which proclaimed that, though they held all strangers to be guilty, they were willing to hear anything they might have to say in their defence.
• ...so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats's poems, but her family denied both stories.
• when one had been prepared to plunge with disapproving mind into a regrettable chronicle of ill-spent lives
• In his eyes she represented those three-fifths of the world that are necessary and disagreeable and real; the other two-fifths, in perpetual antagonism to the foregoing, were summed up in himself and his imagination.
• The Woman indulged in religion once a week at a church near by,