The novelist Anita Brookner, a shrewder handicapper of the luck of unpartnered women, tested that proposition in her Booker Prize-winning 1984 novel “Hotel du Lac,” in which a bloodless man tries to bully a woman into settling for him.

James is such a grognard, he only plays the original edition of Dungeons and Dragons.

I was wished to your worship by a gentleman.

It's a treat of a colour, said he. That coldish colour like earth, and yet shiny. It's like bog-water.