"I don't think one can talk about angles when describing an island or even a continent, except in a figurative and flowery fashion. As a teacher of geometry, it is my business to dwell among angles; and the thirty-five boys in my class will bear witness to the fact that my relations with angles, great and small, are above reproach. I admit that there are angles everywhere, and that a man who really likes their company will stumble against them in the most unexpected places. But they are sometimes hard to see, unless one deliberately looks for them. I think Charlie must have been looking for them in Trinidad."
"I said angles AND THINGS, and I always stick to what I say. AND THINGS. You will be good enough, Mr. Professor, to draw your map accordingly."
"Gentlemen! I rise to a point of order. Our Indian friend here is greatly annoyed. He has been accused of wearing stays. At his urgent request I have convinced myself, by personal inspection, that he wears nothing of the kind. He is naturally slim-waisted, as befits a worthy representative of the noble Hairyan race. It has also been suggested that he loses caste by his present mode of conduct. He begs me to say that, being a Jamshi-worshipper, he doesn't care a brass farthing about caste. Thirdly, he has been blamed in certain quarters for his immoderate indulgence in Parker's poison. Let me tell you, gentlemen, in my capacity as Vice-President, that for the last four thousand years his family has enjoyed a special dispensation from the Great Mogul, authorizing the eldest son to drink whatever he damn well pleases. Our friend here happens to be the third son. But that is obviously not his fault. If it were, he would have come forward with an apology long ago. Gentlemen! I can't speak fairer than that. Whoever says I'm not a gentleman—why, he isn't one either."
"Hear, hear! I never knew you were an ornithologist, Richards."
"Nor did I—not till this moment. But when it's a question of defending the honour of a Club-member I always rise to the occasion. Some things—they simply make my blood boil. Look at this REFEREE: two weeks out of date! How the blazes is a man—"
"I say, Charlie, what did the fellow on the ranch want to do with that skunk? Something about tickling, wasn't it?"
"Hush, my boy. We can't talk about it here. You're not old enough yet.
I don't think I ought to tell you. It's too funny for words…."
"You're a black-and-white man and I'm a writer, and really, you know, we're a cut above all those sots on the balcony. Now just be reasonable for a moment. Look here. Have you ever thought about the impossibility of realizing colour description in landscape? It's struck me a good deal lately, here, with this blue sea, and those orange tints on the mountain, and all the rest of it. Take any page by a well-known writer—take a description of a sunset by Symonds, for example. Well, he names all the gorgeous colours, the yellow and red and violet, or whatever it may be, as he saw them. But he can't make you see them—damned if he can. He can only throw words at your head. I'm very much afraid, my dear fellow, that humanity will never get its colour-values straightened out by means of verbal symbols."
"I always know when a man is drunk, even when I'm drunk myself."
"When?"