He had the look of one who had drunk the cup of life and found a dead beetle at the bottom.

Freddie experienced the sort of abysmal soul-sadness which afflicts one of Tolstoy's Russian peasants when, after putting in a heavy day's work strangling his father, beating his wife, and dropping the baby into the city's reservoir, he turns to the cupboards, only to find the vodka bottle empty.

She looked like something that might have occured to Ibsen in one of his less frivolous moments.

Gussie, a glutton for punishment, stared at himself in the mirror.

That is life. Just one long succession of misunderstandings and rash acts and what not. Absolutely.

He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.