← It was the hour before dinner. 🔊
← Going into the aforesaid domino-room, I had passed a table at which sat a pale man with an open book before him. 🔊
← He was smoking a cigarette, with an untasted salmi of something on his plate and a half-empty bottle of Sauterne before him, and he was quite silent. 🔊
← Long before seven o'clock I was back at the Vingtième. 🔊
← Well, he had gone straight to the catalogue, of course,—to the S volumes,—and had stood long before SN-SOF, unable to take this volume out of the shelf because his heart was beating so. 🔊
← I remember pausing before a wide door-step and wondering if perchance it was on this very one that the young De Quincey lay ill and faint while poor Ann flew as fast as her feet would carry her to Oxford Street, the "stony-hearted stepmother" of them both, and came back bearing that "glass of port wine and spices" but for which he might, so he thought, actually have died. 🔊
← He was utterly forgotten before any one, so far as I am aware, noticed that he was no longer hanging around. 🔊
← You realize, therefore, that on that afternoon, when it comes round, there the selfsame crowd will be, and there Soames will be, punctually, he and they doing precisely what they did before. 🔊