That cat was a spy. You had to take a pot shot at it. It was a very clever German midget dressed up in a cheap fur coat.

Father said I have no sense of humor at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no sense of humor.

You take a really sleepy man, Esmé, and he always stands a chance of again becoming a man with all his fac—with all his f-a-c-u-l-t-i-e-s intact.

He said I was unequipped to meet life because I had no sense of humor.

Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words "Dear God, life is hell." Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, "Fathers and teachers, I ponder, 'What is Hell?' I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.

She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations.