... with a bodice as snug as
the head of a drum, the lord of all it contained
appeared in the doorway" 48

"It took half an hour to dig the car out, and push
her up from the hollow where the snow lay thickest" 272

"Jack's hand, inside Mr. Stokes's beautiful, tall
collar, shook Bertie back and forth till his teeth
chattered like castanets" 328

CHAPTER I

One hears of people whose hair turned white in a single night. Last
night I thought mine was turning. I had a creepy feeling in the roots,
which seemed to crawl all the way down inside each separate hair,
wriggling as it went. I suppose you couldn't have nervous prostration of
the hair? I worried dreadfully, it kept on so long; and my hair is so
fair it would be almost a temptation for it, in an emergency, to take
the one short step from gold to silver. I didn't dare switch on the
light in the _wagon-lit_ and peep at my pocket-book mirror (which
reflects one's features in sections of a square inch, giving the survey
of one's whole face quite a panorama effect) for fear I might wake up
the Bull Dog.

I've spelt him with capitals, after mature deliberation, because it
would be nothing less than _lese majeste_ to fob him off with little
letters about the size of his two lower eye-tusks, or chin-molars, or
whatever one ought to call them.

He was on the floor, you see, keeping guard over his mistress's shoes;
and he might have been misguided enough to think I had designs on
them--though what I could have used them for, unless I'd been going to
Venice and wanting a private team of gondolas, I can't imagine.

I being in the upper berth, you might (if you hadn't seen him) have
fancied me safe; but already he had once padded half-way up the
step-ladder, and sniffed at me speculatively, as if I were a piece of
meat on the top shelf of a larder; and if half-way up, why not all the
way up? _Il etait capable du tout._

I tried to distract my mind and focus it hard on other things, as
Christian Scientists tell you to do when you have a pin sticking into
your body for which _les convenances_ forbid you to make an exhaustive
search.

I lay on my back with my eyes shut, trying not to hear any of the sounds
in the _wagon-lit_ (and they were not confined to the snoring of His
Majesty), thinking desperately. "I will concentrate all my mentality,"
said I to myself, "on thoughts begin