The Gioconda Smile and Other Stories

'The greatest pleasure in the world,' Mrs Escobar was fond of saying, 'is being kind to other people.' Particularly, she might have added, when the other people are young and ravishing little creatures who worship you.

And there's Dostoievsky instead of murder, and D. H. Lawrence as a substitute for sex.

If I lived in splendid isolation, it was because I lacked the audacity to make war - even to make entangling alliances.

He always thought of art; that was what was wrong with him.

I can sympathize with people's pains, but not with their pleasures. There is something curiously boring about somebody else's happiness.

When, some fifty years hence, my grandchildren ask me what I did when I was in Oxford in the remote days towards the beginning of our monstrous century, I shall look back across the widening gulf of time and tell them with perfect good faith that I never worked less than eight hours a day, that I took a keen interest in Social Service, and that coffee was the strongest stimulant in which I indulged. And thay will very justly say - but I hope I shall be out of hearing.

Guy, anxious for a little intellectual exercise after so many months of discipline, had been trying to inveigle his companion into a philosophical discussion. Jacobsen consistently eluded his efforts; he was too lazy to talk seriously; there was no profit that he could see to be got out of this young man's opinions, and he had not the faintest desire to make a disciple.