You keep that little lot till after the race, and we will call it in round figures, five hundred pounds." That single afternoon would thus bring me in five hundred thousand pounds--provided the bookie did not blow his brains out.
Backers in Novel-land do not seem to me to know their way about.

If the hero of the popular novel swims at all, it is not like an ordinary human being that he does it.

You never meet him in a swimming-bath; he never pays ninepence, like the rest of us, for a machine.

He goes out at uncanny hours, generally accompanied by a lady friend, with whom the while swimming he talks poetry and cracks jokes.

Some of us, when we try to talk in the sea, fill ourselves up with salt water.