Wimsey's mother, speaking on the detective instinct:
"My dear child, you can give it a long name if you like, but I'm an old-fashioned woman and I call it mother-wit, and it's so rare for a man to have it that if he does you write a book about him and call him Sherlock Holmes."
Ms. Tarrant and Lord Peter, conversing on Tarrant's authentic socialist experiment as a 'worker':
(this passage enjoyed by yours truly, mostly because of its ingenuous ironic statement about socialism, and not for any other reason. thank you for humoring yours truly.)
"We tried once living in a workman's cottage for eight weeks, five of us, on eighteen shillings a week. It was a marvellous experience--on the very edge of the New Forest."
"In the winter?"
"Well, no--we thought we'd better not begin with winter. But we had nine wet days, and the kitchen chimney smoked all the time. You see, the wood came out of the forest, so it was all damp."
"I see. It must have been uncommonly interesting."
"It was an experience I shall never forget," said Miss Tarrant. "One felt so close to the earth and the primitive things. If only we could abolish industrialism. I'm afraid, though, we shall never get it put right without a 'bloody revolution,' you know. It's very terrible, of course, but salutary and inevitable. Shall we have coffee?"
--Clouds of Witness, Dorothy L. Sayers
