And as a few strokes on the nose will make a puppy head shy, so a few rebuffs will make a boy shy all over.

Anything was boomable enough when nothing else was more so: the author of the rotten book, the beauty who was no beauty, the heiress who was only that, the stranger who was for the most part saved from being inconveniently strange but by being inconveniently familiar, the American whose Americanism had been long desperately discounted, the creature in fine as to whom spangles or spots of any sufficiently marked and applied sort could be loudly enough predictated.

Whether it’s palatable for the vice-chairman of Hillary’s presidential campaign to be embroiled in allegations of conflicts of interest, obtaining patronage jobs, or misrepresenting time worked remains to be seen.

I went back in and threw a hand-grenade under the bed and then I brassed up the house. They were dead, of course.