"People who have a heart are still both!"
"A heart! You mean spoons!"
"What a hideous expression! Strephon and Chloe never used that."
"When we have an unfortunate passion now," remarks Mr. Wootton, "we go to Carlsbad. It's only an affair of the liver."
"Or the nerves," suggests Usk. "Flirtation is the proper thing: flirtation never hurts anybody: it's like puff-paste, seltzer water, and Turkish cigarettes."
"Puff-paste may bring on an indigestion when one's too old to eat it!"
"There! Didn't I tell you so? She is always saying something about my age. A man is the age that he feels."
"No, a woman is the age that she looks. If you will quote things, quote them properly."
"The age that she looks? That's so very variable. She's twenty when she enters a ball-room at midnight, she's fifty when she comes out at sunrise; she's sixteen when she goes to meet somebody at Hurlingham, she's sixty when she scolds her maid and has a scene with her husband!"
Lady Usk interrupts him with vivacity: "And he? Pray, isn't he five-and-twenty when he's in Paris alone, and five-and-ninety when he's grumbling at home?"