Soldier of Fortune

“It was days like this, she decided, looking down at the rain-swept street, black days with a black sky and a heaviness in the air, that revealed things about Jane Hoyt—that Jane Hoyt didn’t like.  The specifications called for a Jane Hoyt who was more or less one-dimensional, alert, well-educated major in English literature, matter of fact, sense of humor, American society pigeonhole number sixteen, which was located a little below the junior league pigeonhole and a little above the shopgirl pigeonhole… There was no allowance in the pattern for healthy girls, regardless of pigeonhole, who still had a renegade ghost of savage underlying their well-groomed exterior.”

• from Soldier of Fortune, by Earnest K. Gann

Frenchman’s Creek

“‘Do you remember my father’s aviary in Hampshire?’ she said, ‘and how the birds there were well fed, and could fly about their cage?  And one day I set a linnet free, and it flew straight out of my hands towards the sun?’
“‘What of it?’ he said, clasping his hands behind his back.
“‘Because I feel like that.  Like the linnet before it flew…'”

• from Frenchman’s Creek, by Daphne Du Maurier

Georgette Heyer

“He turned from her to meet Miss Marlow, and his gloomiest forebodings were realized.  She had neither beauty nor countenance, her complexion was poor and her figure worse, her dress was tasteless, and the colourless voice in which she murmured how-do-you-do confirmed him in his instant belief that she was insipid.  He wondered how soon he would be able to bring his visit to an end.”

• Sylvester, by Georgette Heyer