Selected quotations: B

`London!' exclaimed Miss Counihan. `The Mecca of every young aspirant to fiscal distinction.'

Miss Counihan sat on Wylie's knees, not in Wynn's Hotel lest an action for libel should lie, and oyster kisses passed between them. Wylie did not often kiss, but when he did it was a serious matter. He was not one of those lugubrious persons who insist on removing the clapper from the bell of passion. A kiss from Wylie was like a breve tied, in a long slow amorous phrase, over bars' times its equivalent demi-semiquavers. Miss Counihan had never enjoyed anything quite so much as this slow-motion osmosis of love's spittle.

The above passage is carefully calculated to deprave the cultivated reader.