Handbag Woman Quotes

A workplace desk is like a woman's handbag; it's private and a necessity.

With mounting concern, I learned that having a £600 handbag is like having a crush on the Joker in Batman. You MUST do it. It is an irreducible fact of being a woman.

It's the story of a bookseller who finds a handbag in the street one day, takes it home with him, empties out its contents and decides to look for the woman who owns it. He succeeds but when he finds her, he runs off like an idiot.

Can a woman who does not know the contents of her handbag know the contents of her heart?

If you pick a flower, if you snatch a handbag, if you possess a woman, if you plunder a storehouse, ravage a countryside or occupy a city, you are a taker. You are taking. In ancient Greek you use the verb άρπάζειν, which comes over into Latin as rapio, rapere, raptus sum and gives us English rapture and rape — words stained with the very early blood of girls, with the very late blood of cities, with the hysteria of the end of the world. Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.

There's an elderly woman fussing with the top of the cream pitcher, trying to get it open. Her purse sits on the counter, but as I approach, she picks up the handbag and anchors it to her side, crossing her arm over the strap. “Oh, that pitcher can be tricky,” I say. “Can I help?” She thanks me and smiles when I hand her back the cream. I'm sure she doesn't even realize she moved her purse when I got closer. But I did.

You have savings?" she was astonished. As a woman who lived on the very extreme edges of her budget, whose credit card bills were a source of monthly concern, the idea of savings was just so alien. But then this was Ed, a different kind of person altogether. "Why do I know nothing about your savings?" she'd asked. "I wonder!" he'd answered with a smile. "Maybe because I don't want my savings to be translated into "really great investments" like Miu Miu shoes or Hermès handbags.

Mine was something along the lines of 'This is who I am, and this is the level at which I'm going to present myself, I feel fine, and if you don't like it then you're more than welcome to look away, thank you very much.' I decided, quite simply, not to care very much at all. As long as my rear-end and stomach were hidden from the public gaze, then I considered any outfit a roaring success. People are either going to like the look of me, or they're not. And apart from remaining vaguely clean and healthy, there's not very much I can do to control that. Is an eye-lash tint, a facial and the right handbag really going to make all that much difference? With this decision, I think I've spared myself a lot of misery. You may look at me and see a slightly frayed, wool-clad woman with an inexplicably hefty rucksack, but I look in the mirror and simply give thanks for all I've opted out of.

The hardest thing about being a woman isn’t menstruation or giving birth. It’s resisting the pressure to love handbags, makeup, high heels … and men.

At eighteen, she already looks like a woman of sorrows and as her breaths start becoming shorter, tired of looking over her shoulder, she only wants to get away from this city where no one can fathom her love- boundless and profane and real, like her skin and her lips and the insides of her thighs. She knows she can smile, smell like the others. Her skin would bleed too if pricked and yet this reality does not belong to the ones sleeping on the platform floor; this reality is hers and her alone. Thus when she puts the mirror back, she rummages in her handbag, searching for that thing called identity: some of it lost somewhere in the railway colony she had just left behind, some in Sudhanshu’s left jacket pocket, the rest of it scattered here around broken teacups on railings, totally aberrant and arbitrary.

I swear to God I can’t remember when I had a handbag. I know for some woman it’s like an eleventh finger and you don’t even think about it, even if you change every day. But I can’t remember the handbag either. Who can run with a handbag?

It baffles me when I see people saying, ‘I don’t focus on racism. I focus on sexism.’ It leaves me saddened when I hear people saying, ‘You’re OK, but you’re not.’ It makes people, in my opinion, guilty of the same crimes of thoughtlessness that lead to these problems […] Because that person on the bus being harassed is still being harassed whether she’s being harassed for being religious or for being an atheist or being black or being a woman or because of her clothing or because of her body-language or because of her appearance or because of her handbag or because of her accent. That’s all the same problem. It’s not recognizing the basic humanity of a person […] That’s the problem.

I soon learned that everyone in Paris was like that. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast sluglike creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter. “No, no,” you would say, hands aflutter, “not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread.” The sluglike creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn’t want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.

The things that will go I to my handbag are laid out on my dressing table. Two packets of pocket tissue, one 30-centilitre bottle of water, one first aid kit, one packet of wipes, one wallet, one tube of hand cream, one lip balm, one phone, one tampon, one rape whistle. Basically, the essentials for every woman.

He drank some more wine, feeling he was about to commit a forbidden act. A transgression. For a man should never go through a woman's handbag. . .

Besides, the rush-hour train served for company. I settled in under a man's armpit, felt the stud of a woman's handbag digging into me, and thought: I am a part of something.

He drank some more wine, feeling he was about to commit a forbidden act. A transgression. For a man should never go through a woman's handbag-even the most remote tribe would adhere to that ancestral rule.

The girl wriggled around to get his attention, so her light-up sneakers pushed against my handbag and then my arm. When her father finally turned around he said: Rebecca, look what you’re doing! You’re kicking that woman’s arm! I tried to catch his eye and say: it’s fine, it’s no problem. But he didn’t look at me. To him, my arm was not important. He was only concerned with making his child feel bad, making her feel ashamed.

Hey girls, did you hear the news? It's just been scientifically proven that barrettes are dangerous! So are bracelets and bric-a-brac. It's a fact. And don't be fooled by thick-necked macho men who pretend that "girl stuff" is boring or frivolous, because that's just an act. Because as soon as you ask that guy to hold your purse for a minute, he will start to squirm, as if your handbag were full of worms, as he holds it as far away from his rugged body as possible. Because "girl stuff" is made with the gender equivalent of Kryptonite!

She would be like that character in a novel she read once about the woman who rid herself of everything she owned, item by item. She kept paring down, paring down until all she had left could fit in her handbag. Then she walked out the door and left the house behind, too.

Girls and women with autism: You're fine exactly as you are. Yes, you're a bit weird, but that's perfectly alright. You might not feel much like a 'woman', but that's ok too - most of us don't. And you're totally right about handbags. You only need one, and that's a rucksack.

We are nowhere in Boston. However Lucille may look, she will never find us there, or any trace or sign. We pause nowhere in Boston, even to admire a store window, and the perimeters of our wandering are nowhere. No one watching this woman smear her initials in the steam on her water glass with her first finger, or slip cellophane packets of oyster crackers into her handbag for the sea gulls, could know how her thoughts are thronged by our absence, or know how she does not watch, does not listen, does not wait, does not hope, and always for me and Sylvie.

From her handbag she takes a round gilt compact with violets on the cover. She opens it, unclosing her other self, and runs her fingertip around the corners of her mouth, left one, right one; then she unswivels a pink stick and dots her cheeks and blends them, changing her shape, performing the only magic left to her. Rump on a packsack, harem cushion, pink on the cheeks and black discreetly around the eyes, as red as blood as black as ebony, a seamed and folded imitation of a magazine picture that is itself an imitation of a woman who is also an imitation, the original nowhere, hairless lobed angel in the same heaven where God is a circle, captive princess in someone's head. She is locked in, she isn't allowed to eat or shit or cry or give birth, nothing goes in, nothing comes out. She takes her clothes off or puts them on, paper doll wardrobe, she copulates under strobe lights with the man's torso while his brain watches from its glassed-in control cubicle at the other end of the room, her face twists into poses of exultation and total abandonment, that is all. She is not bored, she has no other interests.

The girl (...) pushed against my handbag and then my arm. When her father turned around he said: Rebecca, look what you're doing! You're kicking that woman's arm! I tried to catch his eye and say: it's fine, it's no problem. But he didn't look at me. To him, my arm was not important. He was only concerned with making his child feel bad, making her feel ashamed.

Have you had a look at Ruth’s purse?” Jack’s dad asked him, indicating Dr. von Rohr’s rather large handbag; it was too big to fit under her chair. “More like a suitcase, if you ask me—more like an overnight bag,” William said, winking at Jack. His father was outrageously suggesting that Dr. von Rohr had prepared herself for the possibility of spending the night at the Hotel zum Storchen with Jack! “It’s not every day you meet a man who compliments a woman’s accessories,” Dr. von Rohr told Jack, smiling.

Molly Collins, standing next to Olive Kitteridge, both of them waiting along with the rest, has just looked around behind her at that side of the grocery store, and with a deep sigh says, “Such a nice woman. It isn’t right.” Olive Kitteridge, who is big-boned and taller by a head than Molly, reaches into her handbag for her sunglasses, and once she has them on, she squints hard at Molly Collins, because it seems such a stupid thing to say. Stupid—this assumption people have, that things should somehow be right.

He had grown used to the eyes upon him as he and his uncle traveled from their bedroom community in Brooklyn to Chinatown. When one woman dropped her purse at his feet and Shim handed it back to her with “Your handbag, m’lady,” and a flourish, she’d nearly jumped out of her seat in surprise. He mentioned none of this to Chun, because after nearly a month in Hong Kong in her steady presence, the sharp edges of being treated with suspicion were blunted by a film of nostalgia. New York was home; this trip had made him realize that.

[Silent Messages 2] She sat to rearrange the contents of her disorganized handbag At the crowded bus terminal When she lifted her head for a short interval, Her eyes caught a young couple kissing, touching, and hugging In a performative and exaggerated manner... When the couple noticed her, The young woman gave her a mean and malicious look as if asking: Are you jealous of all the love I am surrounded by? She returned the look with a sly one as if responding: The love that exaggerates in displaying itself in public Is either immature, dead, or dying… [Original poem published in Arabic on December 5, 2022 at ahewar.org]

She was not beautiful, or anywhere near it; but her face, a little too broad, and her firm quiet body, had the confidence of women who have never missed beauty, having had all they want from life without it. She wore a plain dark-red dress which was neither good nor bad; chosen, it seemed, with a thoughtless negative taste, assimilated to herself, and forgotten. She was almost wholly lacking in the paraphernalia of female competition; but its absence was like the absence of small change in the handbag of a queen. Hers was the rare, prideless assurance of the woman whose womanhood has not only succeeded, but has known what to take of success and what to leave aside. She was the kind of woman of whom other women say that they don’t know what men see in her. But Leo knew.

I've just been certified as a shaman, or sha-woman, if you please," Dr. Tuttle said. "You can hop up on the table if you prefer not to stand. You look worse for wear. Is that the expression?" I leaned carefully against the bookshelf. "What do you use the massage table for?" I heard myself ask. "Mystical recalibrations, mostly. I use copper dowels to locate lugubriations in the subtle body field. It's an ancient form of healing—locating and then surgically removing cancerous energies." "I see." "And by surgery I mean metaphysical. Like magnet sucking. I can show you the magnet machine if you're interested. Small enough to fit in a handbag. Costs a pretty penny, although it's very useful. Very. Not so much for insomniacs, but for compulsive gamblers and Peeping Toms—adrenaline junkies, in other words. New York City is full of those types, so I foresee myself getting busier this year. But don't worry. I'm not abandoning my psychiatric clients. There are only a few of you anyway. Hence my new certification. Costly, but worth it. Sit on it," she insisted, so I did, grappling with the edge of the cool pleather of the massage table to hoist myself up. My legs swung like a kid's at the doctor's.

I came from a place where everyone was friendly, where even funeral directors told you to have a nice day as you left to bury your grandmother – but I soon learned that everyone in Paris was [rude]. You would go into a bakery and be greeted by some vast slug-like creature with a look that told you you would never be friends. In halting French you would ask for a small loaf of bread. The woman would give you a long, cold stare and then put a dead beaver on the counter. ‘No, no,’ you would say, hands aflutter, ‘not a dead beaver. A loaf of bread.’ The slug-like creature would stare at you in patent disbelief, then turn to the other customers and address them in French at much too high a speed for you to follow, but the drift of which clearly was that this person here, this American tourist, had come in and asked for a dead beaver and she had given him a dead beaver and now he was saying that he didn’t want a dead beaver at all, he wanted a loaf of bread. The other customers would look at you as if you had just tried to fart in their handbags, and you would have no choice but to slink away and console yourself with the thought that in another four days you would be in Brussels and probably able to eat again.

One can do only so much to control one's life,' Ernestine said, and with that, a summary statement as philosophically potent as any she cared to make, she returned the wallet to her handbag, thanked me for lunch, and, gathering herself almost visibly back into that orderly, ordinary existence that rigorously distanced itself from delusionary thinking, whether white or black or in between, she left the car. Instead of my then heading home, I drove crosstown to the cemetery and, after parking on the street, walked in through the gate, and not quite knowing what was happening, standing in the falling darkness beside the uneven earth mound roughly heaped over Coleman's coffin, I was completely seized by his story, by its end and by its beginning, and, then and there, I began this book. I began by wondering what it had been like when Coleman had told Faunia the truth about that beginning--assuming that he ever had; assuming, that is, that he had to have. Assuming that what he could not outright say to me on the day he burst in all but shouting, "Write my story, damn you!" and what he could not say to me when he had to abandon (because of the secret, I now realized) writing the story himself, he could not in the end resist confessing to her, to the college cleaning woman who'd become his comrade-in-arms, the first and last person since Ellie Magee for whom he could strip down and turn around so as to expose, protruding from his naked back, the mechanical key by which he had wound himself up to set off on his great escapade. Ellie, before her Steena, and finally Faunia. The only woman never to know his secret is the woman he spent his life with, his wife. Why Faunia?

Pat and I smiled to see a small evening bag with a short handle hooked over her left elbow. We wondered why she would carry a handbag in her own home. What would she possibly need from it? I was longing to walk over to Her Majesty, the Queen, and tell her, mother to mother, “Your Majesty, we’ve known Lady Diana quite well for the past year and a half. We’d like you to know what a truly lovely young woman your son is about to marry.” A sincere and uncontroversial prewedding remark. Unfortunately, this was not only the groom’s mother but also Her Majesty, the Queen of England. Protocol prevented our approaching her, since we had not been personally introduced. I toyed briefly with the idea of walking up to her anyway and pretending that, as an American, I didn’t know the rules. But I was afraid of a chilling rebuff and did not want to embarrass Diana, who had been kind enough to invite us. Pat did not encourage me to plunge ahead. In fact, this time he exclaimed, “Have you lost your mind?” Maybe I should have taken a chance. Too timid again! Our next glimpse of the royal family was Prince Philip, socializing a room or two away from the queen and surrounded by attractive women. He was a bit shorter than he appears in photographs, but quite handsome with a dignified presence and a regal, controlled charm. Pat was impressed by how flawlessly Prince Philip played his role as host, speaking graciously to people in small groups, then moving smoothly on to the next group, unhurried and polished. I thought he had an intimidating, wouldn’t “suffer fools gladly” air—not a person with whom one could easily make small talk, although his close friends seemed relaxed with him. It was easy to believe that he had been a stern and domineering father to Prince Charles. The Prince of Wales had seemed much warmer and more approachable.

So he had found himself on the street holding a woman’s handbag. He remembered that he had felt a sort of amused embarrassment but it had never lasted long. Claire would immediately reappear and reclaim her bag. On those rare occasions, Laurent saw that there were women who noticed that the bag belonged to a female, but he had never seen any suspicion in their glances, just amusement. He was obviously a man waiting for his wife. It was as evident as if he had been wearing a sandwich board reading ‘My wife will be back shortly’.

When I did Dangerous Lady, they told me it was too violent and I said – she’s hardly going to hit them with her handbag!

It was not altogether easy to be cordial and warm with this lawyer. She snapped and clicked. Heavy brass snap catch on handbag, heavy copper and brass jewelry that clattered, clump-heel shoes, and a huge silver ring with a horribly ugly African mask design, frowning eyebrows, hard voice: clack, clash, snap … In the second ten seconds, Haber suspected that the whole affair was indeed a mask, as the ring said: a lot of sound and fury signifying timidity. That, however, was none of his business. He would never know the woman behind the mask, and she did not matter, so long as he could make the right impression on Miss Lelache the lawyer.

If you require any evidence that femininity can be more fierce and dangerous than masculinity, all you need to do is ask the average man to hold your handbag or a bouquet of flowers for a minute, and watch how far away he holds it from his body. Or tell him that you would like to put your lipstick on him and watch how fast he runs off in the other direction. In a world where masculinity is respected and femininity is regularly dismissed, it takes an enormous amount of strength and confidence for any person, whether female- or male-bodied, to embrace their feminine self.

Their primary customers are upper-income women between thirty and fifty years sold. The average markup on a handbag is ten to twelve times production cost. Perfume has, for more than seventy years, served as an introduction to a luxury brand. The message was clear: buy our brand and you too, will live a luxury life. The contradiction between personal indulgence and conspicuous consumption is the crux of the luxury business today: the convergence of its history with its current reality. Today, luxury brand items are collected like baseball cards, displayed like artwork, brandished like iconography. The tycoons have shifted the focus from what the product is to what is represents. Perfume has a mystical, magical quality. It catches your attention, enchants you. It complements and enhances your personality. it stirs emotion, within you and others around you. Perfume was a link between gods and mortals. It was a way to contact the gods, Hermes's Jean-Claude Ellena told me. Now it is a profane link: it's between you and me. Contentment is natural wealth. Luxury is artificial poverty. Socrates More than anything else today, the handbag tells the story of a woman: her reality, her dreams. Oscar Wilde said elegance is power. If it would abolish avarice, you must abolish its mother, luxury. Cicero People don't believe there is a difference between real and fake anymore. Bernard Arnault's marketing plan had worked: consumers don't buy luxury branded items for what they are, but for what they represent. Luxury is the ease of a T-shirt in a very expensive dress. If you don't have it, you are not a person used to luxury. You are just a rich person who can buy staff. Karl Lagerfeld Luxury is exclusivity, it is made for you and no one else has it. At a minimum, it must be impeccable. Maximum, unique. If you do luxury, Louboutin explained, you have to treat people in a human way and you have to be elegant. You can't ask poor people in bad conditions to make beautiful things.

That dress there, not one woman in a hundred in this mall could fit into it or afford it. But the dresses aren’t supposed to be sold. They’re designed to be shown at fashion shows that will make women imagine they’re acquiring some similar essence of glamor by paying a ten- or twenty-fold markup for the brand’s handbags, which are fancy vaginas or wombs only women are allowed to carry, which they then stuff with the brand’s overpriced fragrances as a substitute for the human pheromones they washed away in their morning showers.

The actual handbag is neither here nor there-- it's what you keep in it that's the most important thing.

Not one had ever passed judgement on my cheap handbag to my face. But then, this is a reserved country.

When you’re from a small country like the Netherlands, you easily learn to speak other languages,” she’d said considerately. To this day, I do resort to English unless I’m really sure of the Greek words I’m using. I remember one early morning waiting on the Flying Dolphin to Athens, I’d closed my eyes briefly and opened them to see a Greek lady waiting to sit in the seat next to me. I quickly moved my handbag out of her seat and told her “Signome, eimai horismeni.” The lady looked at me with a very strange expression, sat in the seat and didn’t look my way or speak again. Well no wonder she doesn’t bother with me after I said that—what a dumb thing to say: “Excuse me, I’m tired.” Yet again I was embarrassed again at my lack of ability to communicate easily. “What exactly did you say?” Mia asked when I related the incident at our next Ladies’ Night. As soon as I repeated the words, everyone burst out laughing. “Pamela, kourasmini is the word for ‘tired’. What you told the woman was, “Excuse me, I’m divorced!

It reminded me how, at work that week, there'd been a meeting when a client visited, a woman, and after she'd left the conference room, the first task had been to evaluate her aesthetically, to weigh in on her breasts and legs, the make and quality of her handbag.

This beautiful, slender German Shepherd with erect ears and a cold glare stood at attention, awaiting the order. I watched the canine's handler.  The man's lips moved ever-so-slightly, and the dog was off.  EMS was going wild.  They'd apparently never seen the K9 unit in action, either.  I glanced over to the waiting room, and I swear, every last person stood with their noses pressed against the windows. When I looked back outside, the police dog was dangling from the woman's forearm.  Even then, she continued to move around and yell.  She refused to drop her handbag and swatted at the dog's head. I'm pretty sure we were all rooting for the dog. The

Feeling secure for the moment, I took in a few more details. She was wearing a midnight blue dress, something with texture, maybe raw silk. It was cut just above the knee, with three-quarter length sleeves, an off-the-shoulder neckline, and a deep V cut in the back and front. Her shoes were patent leather stilettos with sharp toes. There was a handbag to match the shoes, and a gold Cartier watch with a gold link band encircling her left wrist. It was a man’s watch, large and heavy on her wrist, and its incongruous heft served to accentuate her femininity. Her hair was swept back and away from her face in a way that accentuated her profile. Overall the look was controlled and sleek, sophisticated and sexy. None of it, especially the shoes, would be ideal for escape and evasion, if it came to that, so I realized she must have chosen it all for some other operational imperative. There are all sorts of weapons in the world, and I reminded myself that when this woman was dressed for work, she was anything but unarmed.

You could wither away waiting for gin here,” the woman just in front of me warned. She spoke with a clipped English accent and was tall and slim, wearing a deep-green Ascot gown and a matching ostrich-feather hat. “Thank God I planned ahead.” She reached into a small jet-bead handbag and pulled out a silver flask, handing it to me. I

I’ve found that the real empowerment comes from menopause, not periods. There were white sheets in my future, and I could finally buy a nice pair of underwear. Of course, my blap (belly plus lap) would cover most of the pretty parts. But who cares? I was delighted to trade my monthly ventures into womanly hell for a flesh canopy. The freedom I was about to embrace was priceless. I could spend the night as a guest at someone else’s house without anxiously checking the bed in the morning. I wouldn’t have to carry a handbag big enough to run away from Nazis with the family silver. And I could finally break up with my heating pad, a moment I couldn’t wait for.

[Silent Messages 2] She was rearranging her messy handbag at the crowded bus station When she lifted her head for a short interval, Her eyes caught a young couple kissing, touching, and hugging In an exaggerated and performative manner When the couple noticed her, The young woman gave her a mean and malicious look as if asking: Are you jealous of all the love I am surrounded by? She returned the look with a sly one as if responding: The love that exaggerates in displaying itself in public Is either new and inexperienced, dead, or dying… [[Original poem published in Arabic on December 5, 2022 at ahewar.org]

A woman's handbag is such a wonder! What a marvel of grace, intimacy, and childishness! (Blood Wedding - English translation).

Then, between two sheets of paper, they discovered a third, left there by accident. Clearly written at the top were the words, 'Copy and circulate'. It was the front page of Résistance, mercifully unfinished. Ordered to explain it, I admitted with a suitable degree of reluctance that it was a copy of a tract exhorting the French people to hoard all their nickel coins. I said I had abandoned the project as I was such a bad typist, but that I had made five copies that I had left on seats in the Métro. All in all, it was a plausible story that would only cost me two or three months in prison. I chuckled inwardly as I thought about the Résistance file, with its four hundred names and addresses, lying quietly hidden — together with copies of all the tracts we had published since September 1940 — under the stair carpet between floors. After asking my permission with great ceremony, my gentleman visitors used my telephone to report back to their chief on the success of their mission. Then they hung up, and invited me to leave with them. It was at this point that I remembered the Roosevelt speech that Léo had given me two days before, which was still in my handbag! I asked permission to go to the toilet, which they granted, though not without first snatching my bag from me and ordering me not to shut the door.

Buon giorno, Commissario,’ she said as she came in, her smile reminding him, fleetingly, of gelato all’ amarena–scarlet and white – colours matched by the stripes of her silk blouse. She came into the office and stepped a bit to the side, allowing another woman to come in behind her. Brunetti glanced at the second woman and was briefly conscious of a square-cut suit in cheap grey polyester, its skirt in unfashionable proximity to low-heeled shoes. He noticed the woman’s hands clasped awkwardly around a cheap imitation leather handbag, and turned his eyes back to Signorina Elettra.

That is a fine piece — very rare, very valuable! I make you a good price, because I like you!” “How can it be rare?” demanded Dame Hester. “I took it from this tray where there are thirty more just like it!” “You do not see with the eyes of a connoisseur! That is an image of the Garre Mountain effrit, who casts thunder stones. This piece is especially lucky and will win your gambles at the dogfights! Since I am poor and ignorant, I will let you have it for the laughable price of twenty sols!” Dame Hester stared at her in angry amazement. “It is true that I am laughing! Clearly you lack all decency to ask any price whatever for this repulsive little gewgaw! Do you take me for a fool? I am seriously insulted.” “No matter. I insult better folk than you several times a day. It is no novelty; in fact, it is a pleasure.” Dame Hester brought out a coin. “This is the value I place upon that horrid little item, and only for the pleasure it will give me when I describe your miserable shop to my friends.” “Bah,” said the woman. “Take it at no charge. You shall never gloat that you outdid me in noblesse oblige. Take it and be gone!” “Why not? I shall do so. Please wrap it for me tastefully.” “I am too busy.” Dame Hester dropped the effigy into her handbag and marched from the shop. Myron paused long enough to place a sol into the tray. The proprietress, once more perched on her high stool, watched impassively, making no comment.

woman in heels stands a statistical likelihood of ending her evening with her shoes in her handbag, barefoot and demanding a piggyback to the taxi stand in order to “keep her tights clean.” Men are invariably the pig whose back is called for.

hot sandwiches. ‘How are you?’ he asked, looking at her arms. ‘It’s healing,’ Adele assured him. She pulled a leaflet for the woman’s refuge in Norwich from her handbag. ‘The nurse gave me this. It seems it’s the nearest place I can go.’ Henry took the leaflet and read