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The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2) QUOTES

The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2) QUOTES

1 " The Bodleian above anything else made Oxford what it was . . . There was something incommunicably grand about it, something difficult to understand unless you had spent your evenings there or walked past it on the way to celebrate the boat race, a magic that came from ignoring it a thousand times a day and then noticing its overwhelming beauty when you came out of a tiny alley and it caught you unexpectedly. A library--it didn't sound like much, but it was what made Oxford itself. The greatest library in the world. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

2 " I've had my wild times now and then — more than my share perhaps — and I don't think I'll give them up, because I like them too well. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

3 " Taken together, the years of that era had added up to a gradual reclamation of rights that was on par with the Magna Carta. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

4 " Above all it was eerie that James and George Payson’s deaths were so similar: both bodies found in public fields, their bodies mauled, their lives over at the age of twenty. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

5 " There’s no question about it. Unless James Payson and Peter Wilson’s regimental training encompassed a uniform lesson on the proper way to commit suicide, they were both murdered. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

6 " Though all the Englishmen in Punjab lived well, with villas and servants to themselves, every one of them at that uneasy moment would have made the trade Lysander proposed. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

7 " Ashen and dismayed, one of his two best friends recently dead, he seemed worlds away from the jovial and high-spirited young man Lenox had met in Lincoln’s Grove Quad less than a week ago. There was no fight in him—at the moment, anyway "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

8 " He didn’t know how many more small moments of her goodness, of her strength and intelligence and well-ordered generosity, he could take. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

9 " And while he was looking forward to lunch—and while he took pleasure in examining his new book—he could not rid himself of the question he had been asking himself for weeks, as well as that entire morning: How on God’s green earth was he supposed to ask one of his oldest friends, Lady Jane Grey, to be his wife? "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

10 " She was a pretty and lovable but perhaps not a beautiful woman, with wide, intelligent, peaceful eyes and a smiling mouth that ran pink and red depending on the weather. She rarely dressed inside the fashion, yet always managed to look fashionable, and while there were those in London society who condemned her curling, unostentatious hair as dull, there were others who thought it her best asset. Lenox, of course, stood with this latter group. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

11 " For his tears were entirely genuine, born out of a grief that surpassed not only words but the years of upbringing that had taught him to keep a stiff upper lip. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

12 " Give him open rein at a dinner party and there was no level of tediousness he might not achieve. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

13 " That’s correct, Mr. Lenox, you’re correct. You see, in the first place, I wouldn’t want to go to the police. But in the second place, I think the police would have laughed. I know you won’t laugh. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

14 " It was quick thinking. I have all the admiration in the world for the lad, I have to say. We know as well that he specifically sent down to the scout before he left, asking that his room remain undisturbed! "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

15 " So for the walking boots and the walking stick to have been so heavily used was out of the ordinary, and for him to put them on the armchair was doubly out of the ordinary. After all, why not just leave them by the door for the scout to clean? "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

16 " He refused to say. All night long his refrain seemed to be ‘I wish I could tell you that, young Mr. Payson, but I cannot. For your own sake and mine.’ He must have said just those words six or seven times. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

17 " There you take me into deeper waters. It’s difficult to gauge whether the cat was merely used to conceal a message, or whether it was in itself a message—to "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

18 " Before him was a book he had borrowed from Andy Scratch, called The Heroes of Punjab. It told the story of the Anglo-Sikh wars, which were by now about twenty years in the past. One chapter briefly mentioned that the September Society had been created after the war by the surviving lead officers of the forces there during the period. The Society maintained close bonds, according to the book. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

19 " Between them they finished three bottles of claret, which went a long way toward the establishment of good feeling at the table, and by the time they stood up they all seemed to agree about something not quite spelled out but nonetheless significant. "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)

20 " But the larger question loomed. What was the nature of the history between Payson’s father and his old battalion mates that it had such force twenty years into the future? That ostensibly reasonable men would kill for it? "

― Charles Finch , The September Society (Charles Lenox Mysteries, #2)