Papa went despairingly upstairs and said to mamma, "Livy the mahogany-room won't go on.

I have just opened the window to see." "Why, Youth," mamma replied "if you've opened the window, why of coarse the alarm will ring!" "That's what I've opened it for, why I just went down to see if it would ring!" Mamma tried to explain to papa that when he wanted to go and see whether the alarm would ring while the window was closed he _mustn't_ go and open the window--but in vain, papa couldn't understand, and got very impatient with mamma for trying to make him believe an impossible thing true.
This is a frank biographer, and an honest one; she uses no sand-paper on me.

I have, to this day, the same dull head in the matter of conundrums and perplexities which Susy had discovered in those long-gone days.
Complexities annoy me; they irritate me; then this progressive feeling presently warms into anger.

I cannot get far in the reading of the commonest and simplest contract--with its "parties of the first part," and "parties of the second part," and "parties of the third part,"-- before my temper is all gone.

Ashcroft comes up here every day and pathetically tries to make me understand the points of the lawsuit which we are conducting against Henry Butters, Harold Wheeler, and the rest of those Plasmon buccaneers, but daily he has to give it up.