My men like satyrs grazing on the lawns Shall with their goat-feet dance the antic hay. Marlowe...

Gumbril, Theodore Gumbril Junior, B.A. Oxon., sat in his oaken stall on the north side of the School Chapel and wondered, as he listened through the uneasy silence of half a thousand schoolboys to the...

Gumbril Senior occupied a tall, narrow-shouldered and rachitic house in a little obscure square not far from Paddington. There were five floors, and a basement with beetles, and nearly a hundred stair...

“Mister Gumbril!” Surprise was mingled with delight. “This is indeed a pleasure!” Delight was now the prevailing emotion expressed by the voice that advanced, as yet without a visible source, from the...

Lypiatt had a habit, which some of his friends found rather trying⁠—and not only friends, for Lypiatt was ready to let the merest acquaintances, the most absolute strangers, even, into the secrets of ...

One after another, they engaged themselves in the revolving doors of the restaurant, trotted round in the moving cage of glass and ejected themselves into the coolness and darkness of the street. Shea...

It was between Whitefield Street and the Tottenham Court Road, in a “heavenly Mews,” as he liked to call it (for he had a characteristic weakness for philosophical paronomasia), that Casimir Lypiatt l...

It was Press Day. The critics had begun to arrive; Mr. Albemarle circulated among them with a ducal amiability. The young assistant hovered vaguely about, straining to hear what the great men had to s...

Critically, in the glasses of Mr. Bojanus’s fitting-room, Gumbril examined his profile, his back view. Inflated, the Patent Small-Clothes bulged, bulged decidedly, though with a certain gracious opule...

Fan-shaped, blond, mounted on gauze and guaranteed undetectable, it arrived from the wig-maker, preciously packed in a stout cardboard box six times too large for it and accompanied by a quarter of a ...

Mr. Boldero liked the idea of the Patent Small-Clothes. He liked it immensely, he said, immensely. “There’s money in it,” he said. Mr. Boldero was a small dark man of about forty-five, active as a bir...

Gumbril had spent the afternoon at Bloxam Gardens. His chin was still sore from the spirit gum with which he had attached to it the symbol of the Complete Man; he was feeling also a little fatigued. R...

“You? Is it you?” She seemed doubtful. Gumbril nodded. “It’s me,” he reassured her. “I’ve shaved; that’s all.” He had left his beard in the top right-hand drawer of the chest of drawers, among the tie...

In spite of the taxi, in spite of the gobbled dinner, they were late. The concert had begun. “Never mind,” said Gumbril. “We shall get in in time for the minuetto. It’s then that the fun really begins...

Mrs. Viveash descended the steps into King Street, and standing there on the pavement looked dubiously first to the right and then to the left. Little and loud, the taxis rolled by on their white whee...

They were playing that latest novelty from across the water, “What’s he to Hecuba?” Sweet, sweet and piercing, the saxophone pierced into the very bowels of compassion and tenderness, pierced like a r...

The blackamoors had left the platform at the end of the hall. The curtains looped up at either side had slid down, cutting it off from the rest of the room⁠—“making two worlds,” Gumbril elegantly and ...

The two o’clock snorted out of Charing Cross, but no healths were drunk, this time, to Viscount Lascelles. A desiccating sobriety made arid the corner of the third-class carriage in which Gumbril was ...

Two hundred and thirteen Sloane Street. The address, Rosie reflected, as she vaporized synthetic lilies of the valley over all her sinuous person, was decidedly a good one. It argued a reasonable pros...

After leaving Mr. Mercaptan, Lypiatt had gone straight home. The bright day seemed to deride him. With its shining red omnibuses, its parasols, its muslin girls, its young-leaved trees, its bands at t...

Zoe ended the discussion by driving half an inch of penknife into Coleman’s left arm and running out of the flat, slamming the door behind her. Coleman was used to this sort of thing; this sort of thi...

“Well,” said Gumbril, “here I am again.” “Already?” Mrs. Viveash had been reduced, by the violence of her headache, to coming home after her luncheon with Piers Cotton for a rest. She had fed her hung...

Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare. The pedals were geared to a little wheel under the saddle and the rim of the wheel rubbed, as it revolved aga...