He had a unique stride: it looked as though his body was being dragged forward and his legs had to flail around underneath it, landing wherever they could find room. It wasn't so much a walk as a collapse, indefinitely postponed.
Instead, people would take pains to tell her that beauty was only skin-deep, as if a man ever fell for an attractive pair of kidneys.
It was done far more often than the audiences ever realized -- when singers had a sore throat, or had completely dried, or had turned up so drunk they could barely stand, or, in one notorious instance many years previously, had died in the interval and subsequently sung their famous aria by means of a broom-handle stuck up their back and their jaw operated with a piece of string.
After you'd known Christine for any length of time, you found yourself fighting a desire to look into her ear to see if you could spot daylight coming the other way.
No male had ever touched Agnes before, except perhaps to push her over and steal her sweets.
Greebo could, in fact, commit sexual harassment simply by sitting very quietly in the next room.
People who would not believe a High Priest if he said the sky was blue, and was able to produce signed affidavits to this effect from his white-haired old mother and three Vestal virgins, would trust just about anything whispered darkly behind their hand by a complete stranger.
It was where the city kept all those things it occasionally needed but was uneasy about, like the Watch-house, the theatres, the prison and the publishers. It was the place for all those things which might go off bang in unexpected ways.
