After You with the Pistol

I don't much care about tea-drinking in the afternoon; in the morning the stuff Jock brings to me in bed is like that Nepenthe which the wife of Thone gave to Jove-born Helena, but in the p.m. it always makes me think of Ganges mud in which crocodiles have been coupling.

"You would now be an enemy, in the third class, of my own organization."

"Only third class?" I asked in the indignant tones which Queen Victoria surely used when she received the Abyssinian Order of Chastity, Second Class.

It will be a sad day for the world when the Oriental gent realizes that Western bumbling is only Eastern guile in a different idiom. Well, a lot of it, anyway.

I have this heavy addiction to life and I'm told that the withdrawal symptoms are shocking.

The cold pork in the fridge was wilting at the edges; it and I exchanged looks of mutual contempt, like two women wearing the same hat in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

Fate's fickle finger was feeling for my fundament.

Sleep slunk up like a black panther and sank its kindly fangs into what remained of the Mortdecai brain.