If you are eccentric enough to want a hobby that no one else has yet tried, try taking about five hundred alert and inquiring minds and setting them down in a wood in the middle of Buckinghamshire and give them a year or two to ferment. The results will astonish you. p 170

...in this book, you are seeing Muriel through my eyes and that should cause you to make certain allowances, for I do not set myself up to be the goddess of cold, impartial justice at the Old Bailey. Also, we have plenty of time. You and I are in this book-reading, book-writing business for fun, I hope, and frankly, it is not a matter of life and death if we never get to Muriel--she was not a Cleopatra or anything. So I am not going to tell you either that I am thus and so. I think that is a very difficult thing for anyone to do, for few people can see themselves as others see them. No. I am not going to say a lot of 'I ams.' I am going to tell you what happened to me, in a brief way, between getting the letter signed 'Muriel Thornton' and actually seeing Muriel in the flesh, for I have always found the 'I am--' suspect and usually my suspicions have been well-founded.

Do you know this stuff called 'umbrage' that people are said to 'take' now and then. I have never taken it myself and have never understood why some people do, for it looks to me like a bundle of greyish-brown stuff, about the size of a bundle of asparagus (but not succulent at all) and, indeed, in texture like the dried herbs you may have seen hanging in a good French kitchen (but not aromatic at all, as the herbs are). When people take it, they take the bundle in both hands and go away into a dark corner where you cannot see them, so I have never been able to find out what they do with it. I once enquired of My Friend Monica (she is a new one on you and very nice, although a little short-tempered), who, although not an umbrage-taker herself any more than I am, had known a number of addicts to it, and she said that it was not this bundle of stuff that I am telling you about at all. No. Monica said she was sure that they got it in bottles of blue ribbed glass from the chemist's shop and that they took it in private, in their bedrooms or in the bathroom, without measuring it with a spoon or anything but just by tilting the bottles to their mouths. That, she said, was very important, this thing of there being no regular, prescribed dose. In the end, after a long discussion which cost over a pound in Dry Martinis at 1939 officers' mess prices, Monica and I decided that the umbrage-takers she had known were more confirmed addicts than those I had known and that her lot were taking the distilled essence, put up in blue bottles, of these bundles I was telling you about.