Everybody knows that when you have a layoff, you use it as chance to get rid of the people you wanted to get rid of anyway, but couldn't document or hadn't bothered documenting as bad employees […] . If you don't have much dead wood, you hope they make you use a seniority list, because then you can say it's out of your control.

He spent the afternoon shaping a swagger-stick from the branch of jarrah and talking with Miss La Rue, who had sufficiently unbent toward him to notice his existence.

Matthias turned his lonely house into a mart where furniture, plate and titledeeds to fields and messuages could be brought, evaluated, and transferred to the hands of the primal twelve as administrators.

The baryta-salt dried up to a gummy mass, but after a while swelled up in cauliflower-like tufts, which effloresced and fell to pieces on exposure to the air.