Sentence The Seventh

Maude Lyttleton never hesitated in her ungainly descent of the stairs, but she saw from the corner of her left eye – the right, the wayward, unfocussed and so disconcerting to anyone unfamiliar with her acuity, still scanned the stairwell – the fast-approaching figure with hands upraised as if to fling her over the railing and her mind made a rapid calculation: less lissom than a gazelle, nor so lissome as the ballerinas of Les Ballet Trockadero she had seen at the Festival Theatre two years previously; wearing the 

black trouser-suit, white shirt and blue tie so favoured by politicians in this city, yet giving off an impression of someone at odds with their own outward appearance; this was no mere man, no man at all, but a person weel kent to the readership of the Scotsman, or the Sunday Post, and oft-discussed in the drawing-rooms of the Capital's culturati and so, when Maude spoke, softly, but with excellent diction: 

 

“Roxie Davidova, as I live and breathe, come to paint the town red I presume” her words stopped the leader of Scotland's tiny Unionist Party in her tracks, felt to her like a slap in the face with a wet haddock, and she flushed, her face redder than the Socialist Flag, disconcertingly so, and to Maude's temporary confusion she saw tears spring from Miss Davidova's eyes and stream down her cheeks, the sight of which brought a tenderness to her breast and she placed a comforting hand on the other's sobbing shoulder and “there, there, pet,” she murmured, her voice full of concern and compassion.

Sentence The Eighth

“I wonder,” thought Maude Lyttleton, as she comforted the seemingly heartbroken, short, dumpy, and far from lissom, Roxie Davidova, clutching the forlorn Leader of Scotland's Unionist Party to her breast, and murmuring soothing words, “if all is not what it seems, perhaps, if Miss Davidova's attachment to the English Party led by the uncharismatic Duncan MacAroon, is but a simulacrum, an appearance adopted in defiance of her true self – for is she not by nature a rococo creature, 

 

 full of surprises and contradictions, at one and the same time a gentle and loving woman, yet adopting a facade at odds with her own self, or” and here Maude felt it necessary to use an expression oft employed by her cousin Agatha who resided in one of what Maude still thought of as 'the American Colonies' “merely an inside baseball matter – of interest only to the cognoscenti,” at which moment she was startled by a faint cry from far below, deep, down, in the bowels of the earth and Maude suddenly recalled her reason for being where she was – her fear that some harm had befallen her dearest, darling, Daphne Dumbiedykes, and seizing Roxie Davidova by one of her small, plump hands, she pulled her down the stairs with the cry of “hold on Daphne, we're coming!”