Everybody dies, don't they?

Everybody come back, isn't that so?

You tried to get into the locked drawer today, didn't you?

How do that they'd come back, mother?

What's the secret? Old Man's Beard by H. Russell Wakefield

Mr. Mickley almost precisely satisfies our American friend's definition of a regular fella.

That is to say, he makes an article of commerce and by selling it at seven times its cost of production has prospered greatly.

Mr. Bickley has merely super tax worries. He's a good mixer. He knows 63 persons by their Christian names.

He is always ready to talk golf shop with particular reference to a gross 87 he once shot on a short course burnt to a cinder.

He makes almost exactly the same slice of the first tea twice on Saturday and twice on Sunday

and can stow away several rounds of drinks without becoming unduly pugnacious, verbose or pleased with himself. He goes

to and fro from the city in a big car and smokes a big cigar during the process, and so on and

so on. But he slightly diverges from the type in two respects. He quite frequently reads a book that has

neither been written by Mr. Edgar Wallace nor recommended to him for its candid treatment

of the sex question, and he hasn't got quite the orthodox regular fellow's life partner.

Mrs. Bickley is a bit of an enigma to the other RFs.

Sometimes they are reassured that she is just what she ought to be,

a lovely little woman, again in our American friends idiom,

the adjective being a tribute to her character rather than her physical charms,

though these are still considerable.

But at other times the RFs have an unpalatable impression

that she would like to take them by the shoulders and drown them in deep water.

...