Satire Books

"A Walk on the Wild Side, which Algren at times seemed to think little of, is to my mind an American classic, a home-grown version of the European Bildungsroman, to be read alongside Huckleberry Finn, The Red Badge of Courage and Native Son."

"There, in Dockery's Dollhouse [...] a straight-haired flat-chested hard-of-eye hustler called Tough Kitty was trying to get credit for just one little beer. / But the bartender, acting as oddly as , didn't seem to hear. / [...] / So she drew from the pocket of her faded blue jeans a small change-purse and emptied it on the bar: twelve pennies and one nickel. / ‘I got enough for a beer,’ she took count, ‘but not enough to get drunk on.’ And looked left-out of everything."

"‘More shameful things are worn by women on the open street these days than were worn in brothels a few years ago,’ the old man went on and on. And there was nobody to ask him how did he know what had been worn in brothels a few years ago. / ‘Even our little girls are turned out into the streets almost naked, inviting God's judgement on sin black as Sodom! Are we willing to pay the price?’ he asked, and answered his own question, ‘When it comes to God dealing with a nation's sin, there are no dollar days. Are we willing to pay the price?’ / They stared up at him indifferently. If they had the price of anything they would be in the movie or brothel, that look told."

"‘It don't do no good for a man to rise these days, son,’ was Country Kline's curious philosophy, ‘for that can't be done any longer except on the necks of others. And when you make it that way, all the satisfaction is taken out of it. Son, I hope you don't mind my saying so, but you got pimp wrote large all over you – but that's the sorriest way of all to rise, and the reason I'll tell you why – if God ever made anything better than a hustling girl He's kept it to Himself. There's no trick in not going down the drain if you don't live in the sink. But you take a woman who makes her living where the water is sucking the weaker bugs down and she don't go down, she's twice the woman that one who never had to fight for her soul is.’"

"‘I feel like I been everywhere God got land,’ Dove thought, ‘yet all I found was people with hard ways to go. All I found was troubles 'n degradation. All I found was that those with the hardest ways of all to go were quicker to help others than those with the easiest ways. All I found was two kinds of people. Them that would rather live on the loser's side of the street with the other losers than to win off by theirselves; and them who want to be one of the winners even though the only way left for them to win was over them who have already been whipped. / ‘All I found was men and women, and all the women were fallen. Sports of the world, poor bummies, poor tarts, all they were good for was to draw flies I was told. You could always treat one too good, it was said, but you never could treat one too bad. Yet I wouldn't trade off the worst of the lot for the best of the other kind. I think they were the real salt of the earth.’"

"These were neither the great gray wolves of the snowplain wilderness nor fanged cats treed and spitting; but only those small toothless foxes of summer someone had chased and someone had chained, barking at changes in the weather. / [...] / Their crimes were sickness, idleness, high spirits, boredom and hard luck. They were those who had failed to wire themselves to courts, state attorney's office or police. Hardly a stone so small but was big enough to trip them up and when they fell they fell all the way. / [...] / Lovers, sec-fiends, bugs in flight, the tricked, the maimed, the tortured, the terribly fallen and the sly. All those who are wired to nobody, and for whom nobody prays. / That the public defender defends by saying, ‘Your Honor, this man has had his chance.’"

"Because A Walk on the Wild Side is a permanent part of our literature, these people, who continue to live among us, will continue to be heard. That's all Nelson ever wanted his work to accomplish, and what writer could want more?"

"All of the inmates of Tank Ten were white. At night they heard laughter from the Negro tier one flight above, and most of the trusties were short-term Negroes. Murphy insisted it was his influence that kept the tank lily white, but Dove suspected privately that the authorities had something to do with it."

"In the mixed-up April of '32 the numbers of jobless rose to eight millions, two hundred thousand steelworkers took a fifteen percent wage cut and it took a cardinal to perceive that the country's economic collapse was actually a wonderful piece of luck, for every day it brought thousands closer to the poverty of Christ, who had been nowhere near before. For thousands it was the chance of a lifetime to bring Jesus' simplicity, the cardinal said, right into the home. All over the country men and women and even small children began taking advantage of this spiritual opportunity. All manner of little goodies like that were lying about in the mixed-up April of '32."

"Raincoat's cell mate, for example, was a natural whose wife had had him locked up because he had made up his mind to have a baby by their fifteen-year-old daughter. Nobody could talk Natural Bug out of this. He couldn't be roasted or frozen out of it. He knew he was right in this. But Raincoat was the only one to whom he communicated his defense. / ‘He says the kid is a lot better-looking than his wife,’ Raincoat interpreted. ‘And not only that, but she's much younger.’"

"‘Blow wise to this, friend,’ he advised Dove, ‘it's always easier to convict a man of something he didn't do than it is to prove that what he actually was doing was a crime. That's why the nabbers are so much tougher on the man without a record than they are on the finished criminal product. They've got the finished product solved, they can nab him any time, so they can afford to be friendly. It's the bird who pops up on some corner they never seen him around there before, he claims he never been arrested, he got no needle marks, he don't act like a thief and they can't find a set of prints on him that worries them. They figure he must be some too-wise ghee. They got to find a crime to fit him. And if he's innocent that takes persuasion.’"

"‘But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man's jolt. And never you cop another man's plea. I've tried 'em all and I know. They don't work. / Life is hard by the yard, son. But you don't have to do it by the yard. By the inch it's a cinch. And money can't buy everything. For example: poverty.’"

"Another was an old sad lonesome lecher with a face that had never been up from the cellar, who had nobody's sympathy at all; not even his own. The turnkey had nicknamed him ‘Raincoat’ – which was kinder than what the prisoners had named him. / This ancient simple satyr's offense had been nothing more dreadful than the devising of a time-and-money-saving operation. [...] Here and there, passing some woman who appeared deserving, he would fling the raincoat wide for her amazement and delight, then modestly button himself and modestly hurry on. / Talent can spring up anywhere."

"Bad air and boils – yet sometimes there came a day so blue it caught at the heart like a sense of loss – all these days too blue, all lost. Rainy days were melancholy but sunny ones were worse. When it was raining out there he could sink into a sullen half-dream where nothing could touch him. But blue days recalled his every folly and he'd think, ‘So much time gone! So little time left! Scarcely time left for a boy to rise!’"

"Sometimes one of his glasses was full, sometimes both. In the bar mirror faces of people watched him too steadily. Along the bar faces of dolls watched the people. Faces of people and faces of dolls and his glass was full again. He had come to find somebody whose name was right on the tip of his tongue but just at that moment the juke began playing something about saints marching in. The people began marching behind the saints and the dolls behind the people as Dove began marching too. Where bells were ringing, trains kept switching, saints were marching, time was passing and his glass was full again."

"Whatever it was Floralee had done to make her think God could no longer bear her, it didn't of necessity follow that He was the one who phoned for the Hurry-Up. / One moment the juke was beginning Please Tell Me How Many Times, the next the parlor was full of the boys in blue and someone smashed the glass of the juke – [...] / Where was Five when the box was smashed? Galloping from door to door in nothing more than her earrings and a bath-mat, hollering ‘Get them guys out!’ And rushing three tricks down the hall with their pants in their hands in as much of a hurry not to be witnesses as Five was anxious to prevent them. She shoved one out a window, another walked past a nabber with a bill in his hand, and the same nab said to another – ‘Uncle Charlie!’ And let him pass. / Where was Mama when the juke glass went? Studying a twenty-two-hundred-dollar receipt for down payment on a house and lot, six kennels and a pair of Doberman pinschers; and having her first misgivings. / Where was Finnerty when all this transpired? In a single-motor plane with two thousand two hundred in fives and tens, on his way to Miami to get his armpits tanned."

"‘The best days of my life, my happiest time,’ a human dishrag called Pinky would recall, ‘was doing close-order drill in the evening with the national guard.’ / Pinky had stolen fifty feet of garden hose in lieu of back wages. That the back wages were largely imaginary didn't make the hose less real, and Pinky still had five months to go."

"‘They jumped on my feet. They slapped my ears till I couldn't hear. They put the glare in my eyes and held the lids open till I thought I was going blind and all the time somebody I couldn't see kept hollering right into my ear at the top of his lungs. I got a pivot tooth now in place of one some ham-handed law cracked out, but I aced it out. Years later in stir I used to wake up thinking they were starting on me again, but I aced it. I aced it till one of my fluffs heard a radio broadcast 'n sent me a lawyer. That was when my real troubles begun.’"

"The pianola roll whispered on and on, it had not happened to him before so heart-shakingly as this. / And the moon that could never wane dimmed down to no more than a gas lamp's leaning glow. Drinkers and dancers, gaffers and gamblers, all had gone. / Out in the sand and the Spanish Dagger, in chaparral-pea and honey-mesquite where under the thorn the horned toad waits, the prairie dog slept in his burrow. White bones bleached in the sun. Before the music was over; before the dancing was done. / And a little wind went searching in circles to ask, Where had those lovers gone before the dance was done? / All was well. They had breathed each other's breath. All was well: they had drunk of each other's lips. / All was well, for what was dust had when living been loved."

"The Southern nights grew cooler. The rain came every day. / Long after Hallie had gone to bed one night Dove sat alone on their balcony. Every time a breeze from the river passed, another of the lights below went out, till it seemed the breeze was blowing them out. When the windows both sides of the streets were darkened he turned up the lamp in the small room where she slept. / Across her face a shadow lay, leaving her mouth defenseless to the light. She slept on not knowing how the river breeze had just blown out the last of the lights. Nor how the rainwind was making their room cooler than before. / Nor yet how softly now the night traffic moved two stories down. And how all the anguish he had felt for his ignorance was gone for the first time in his life. And nothing mattered, it seemed in that moment, but that this woman should sleep on, and never know that the wind was blowing out the lights. / Somewhere in the court below someone began playing a piano softly, as though fearing to waken her."

"‘But,’ Finnerty inquired coolly, ‘Didn't it take some time to get used to being smaller than other people after you'd been the biggest thing in sight for so long?’ [...] Finnerty's tone was serene. ‘I don't pretend to compete with you. But Stoodint here now is something else – he'll out-stud any man alive, Big Dad.’ / Schmidt turned on Dove with a swerve of his wheels. ‘Can you do anything I can't do better, bum?’ / ‘I can't do lots of things even able-bodied men can do, mister,’ Dove hurried to say; and even to his own ears that didn't sound quite right. / ‘For example,’ Finnerty helped him, ‘he could never get work as THE LIVING HALF.’"

"Then pressing his finger hard into Dove's chest – ‘You know who he meant by that “joy-of-your-trade” crack? You, that's who. You don't have to take it, Tex. I'm back of you.’ [...] ‘And when I back a man I back him all the way. For as you know, Finnerty don't fight. He just kills and drags out.’"

"‘I don't mind getting roughed up, everybody gets roughed up. Everybody, in jail or out, is shaking somebody else's jolt. The thorn that sticks my side to this day is the one time in my life I was innocent was the one time that I got it.’ [...] Whatever happened, it was Country's consolation, he had Broomface where it pinched. He owed so much time here and there that even were he to serve it concurrently, he was sure to die owing at least fifty years. They'd never be able to collect."

"Nelson Algren's life is terrifying in its proof that talent, love and a determination to speak truth to power can destroy a writer as surely as mediocrity and compromise. A Walk on the Wild Side, the last of Algren's novels to be published in his lifetime, is in consequence a most moving achievement."

"Hallie stood quite still, pitying the power that could not be contained. And after a while smiled down, stroked his hair and agreed as with a child: yes, it was all the fault of his stumps. / To such tenderness he reacted like an enormous cat. And rolled within his massive arms, pressed to the great cave of his chest, his lion's breath against her breast, she felt his passion relentlessly driving. And then it was as though no man till Legless Schmidt had possessed her. / [...] / Schmidt had never felt a woman like that before. With him it was as if he had never had a woman completely till Hallie. Only with her, not until her, never at any moment except those with her was he a man, able, loved, possessing and possessed – his own true man again. / In her he spent a lifetime's wrath. In him she too lived once more. Nine Christmases she had been buried, and twice that many for him. And with each time together, each lived a little while again."

"‘We're all a little on the odd side,’ Hallie guessed, ‘from the life we've led. The life we've all led.’ And taking his hand led him to the bed. / ‘I don't mean for you to love me,’ she had to tell him a minute after, ‘just hold me. Hold.’ / Dove held her, sensing only dimly that in holding her he was saving her."

"‘If we had such good good generals and all of that, how come we got whupped, Hallie?’ / ‘North had more guns. Go to sleep, Dove.’ / But in the big blue middle of the night she felt a nudge. / ‘Why, in that case it weren't a question or right makin' might after all. It was more a matter of might makin' right.’ / ‘Might makes might,’ she murmured sleepily. / ‘Yes, but how I look at it,’ he made one more ageless decision, ‘the reason the North got most guns was because they had the right to start. What I fail to understand is how come it taken them four years to whup a bunch with such a sorry cause as ourn.’"

"Because the air was so close, the whiskey so bad, the prices so high and the place so hard to climb up to, everyone came to Dockery's Dollhouse night after night while other bars stayed empty. / Everyone came, that is, but the law. To this lopsided shambles, where the floor slanted slightly, no police ever came. When the big hush fell that meant trouble was starting, the old man drew the shutters until the trouble was done. / The old man had himself never fought another man in his life – yet he took a senile pleasure in watching others go at it. He pretended that it was the manly thing, to ‘let them fight it out’ – but the titillating joy he took when the first blood flowed was a womanish delight."

"It was that slander-colored evening hour before the true traffic begins, when once again sheets have been changed, again Lifebuoy and permanganate have been rationed; and once again for blocks about, pouting or powdering or dusting their navels, each girl wonders idly what manner of man – mutt, mouse, or moose – the oncoming night will bring her. / Perdido Street, in the steaming heat, felt like a basement valet shop with both irons working. The girls in the crib doors plucked at their blouses to peel them off their breasts. In the round of their armpits sweat crept in the down. Sweat molded their pajamas to their thighs. The whole street felt molded, pit to thigh. It was even too hot to solicit. For normal men don't so much as glance at the girls in heat like that lest the watery navels stick. / Yet the very heat that enervates men infects women with restlessness and the city was full of lonesome monsters. Side-street solitaries who couldn't get drunk, seeking to lose their loneliness without sacrificing their solitude. Dull boys whose whole joy expired in one piggish grunt. Anything could happen to a woman available to anyone. Boredom of their beds and terror of their street divided each."

"Mama had lost the thread. All she could remember was that she had four husbands. / ‘Three of them were thieves and one was a legit man – I'd never marry another legit man. Did you know that a prize fighter is more gentle than other men, outside the ring? That's because he knows what a man's fists can do. Do you know that you're safer living with a man who kills for hire than with a man who has never killed? That's because one knows what killing is. The other don't.’ / ‘Why,’ Navy remarked, ‘in that case ill-fame women ought to make better wives than legitimate girls.’ / Again that odd little silence fell. Nobody knew what to say to that. / ‘Navy, I think that's the nicest thing I've heard anyone say since I've been in the trade,’ Hallie said – [...]"

"When they came to the monkey house he stopped dead. In one cage a hairy little character was banging his knuckles on his girlfriend's skull to make her climb a tree for some special purpose all his own. / ‘Why! There's [a pimp] and [his whore]!’ Dove called to Hallie in real glee, and pitched popcorn at [the pimp]. Then of a sudden it didn't seem so funny after all, and they moved on."

"Long after midnight old lonely trains called up to Mama like lovers forever arriving too late for love. Up from the long grieving river they called, past track and tower and dock, to windows long darkened and doorways long locked; old beaux that had walked Perdido Street long ago, returning to mourn the names of girls they had loved. They had plenty to spend and all night for loving. But the windows were darkened, the doors were locked, and the only girls whose names they knew had no name now but dust."

"‘I never heard of a pimp being elected mayor nor even of one who bothered to vote, so why blame them for the way things are? They weren't the ones who made the laws that let the trade go on. If nobody wanted there to be pimps, honey, there wouldn't be no pimps. Isn't it strange that it's the very ones who say we're a public disgrace who pay us best? You know yourself that it's the ones from the Department who come down early on Saturdays to holler, “Bring us two women and a bottle!” ’ / ‘What's wrong about two women and a bottle?’ Hallie asked, just to find out. / ‘Honey, there's nothing wrong with two women and a bottle, or three or four women and a whole case, so long as you don't sneak it and preach against it the next day.’"

"That nothing could lower human dignity faster than manual labor was understood. ‘Go get yourself a lunch bucket and get back in your ditch’ was the ultimate insult on Perdido Street."

"‘Why, I got a daddy friend don't take a dime off me. He buys me things. He's going to buy me a Cadillac so long I'll have to back up to turn a corner.’ Whatever Fort Worth's real name was, no one ever called her anything but Five, to honor a navel formed to that figure. When asked to show her wonderful navel she would show it, sweetly and simply, just like that. Men pinched her bottom, yet she did not hold herself proudly just because of that. / No chicken farm story was likely to catch Five. She had been brought up on one, and had had enough of that. Yet she was wide open to the Cadillac story, which was nothing more than the chicken farm story on wheels. / Oh, that long easy rider with the real careful driver. When promises would buy Cadillacs, Five would own a whole fleet. / Until that time Five would go on her feet."

"Finnerty closed the door behind him and dropped the key into his pocket. ‘You know I'm not without help, little baby,’ he warned her. / ‘I don't plan to cut you,’ Hallie told him quietly. ‘I got cut once myself. I won't scratch you because I don't like to see a man walking around with scratches on his face. I won't throw acid in your eyes because it makes me sorry to see a blind person. All I'll do is kill you where you stand. If you get through the door I'll kill you on the stair. If you make the stair I'll kill you in the parlor. If you make the street I'll kill you on the curb. I'll kill you in the alley. I'll kill you in God's House. I'll kill you anywhere.’ / Finnerty stood with his head slightly bent, his brow lined by doubt. / ‘Did you lose something, Oliver?’ / ‘My key,’ he told her, ‘I lost my key.’ / ‘My key I take it you mean.’ / ‘Your key.’ / ‘It's laying in your cuff. You got a hole in your pocket. Bring your pants up later and I'll make you a new pocket.’"

"The courts were against them, the police were against them, businessmen, wives, churches, press, politicians and their own panders were against these cork-heeled puppets. Now the missions were sending out sandwich men to advertise that Christ Himself was against them."

"Finnerty, who looked like one of those little Australian foxes with ears half the length of its body, claimed to be five foot but had to be wearing his cowboy boots to make good the boast. / [...] / Oliver owned five women, a single-motored plane and a captive mouse. He claimed to be the first pander in the entire South to transport women by plane. A claim making every single one of the five proud of their five-foot daddy."

"A single iron-colored owl waited in the shadows of noon like a dream waiting only for nightfall to be dreamt. And a scent of decay blew off him, as though he were rotting under his feathers. / To watch where the elephant, crowned with children, swayed as he walked to excite the children. He looked like a great fool of a child himself. Yet he bore the weak upon his back."

"Until a girl had relinquished every claim but those to basin, bed and towel, you couldn't trust her. You couldn't trust her until she had forgotten it was money she was working for. It took a man years of dedication to bring a girl to that. Only when he had madams sending him cash – no money orders – from half a dozen parts of the country might it be truly said of a man that he was a good pimp. / Finnerty's talent lay in his limitless contempt for all things female. He treated women as though they were mindless. And in time they began to act mindlessly."

"He came to an intersection where one road led to town and the other away. The town road was festooned, street lamp to street lamp, with welcoming pennants; it was wide and newly paved. The other was lampless and pennantless and plainly led nowhere at all. Without hesitation Dove chose the nowhere road. For that was the only place, in his heart of hearts, that he really wanted to go."

"‘My line of work, as you may have guessed, Tex, is women. Do you know anything about them?’ / ‘I know that if God made anything better I aint come across it yet, but that's as far as my knowledge goes.’"

"‘When you start hitting toward sixty,’ Gross complained, ‘you feel some days like you want to take a cab to the graveyard and wait for your maker beside your stone. Yet when you've not had an hour's true contentment out of all those sixty years, you don't want to lay down till you've had your hour. You want something for all your pain.’"

"In the cheery old summer of '31 some states were dry and some states were wet. [...] / The Ladder of Success had been inverted, the top was the bottom, and the bottom was the top. Leaders of men still sporting gold watches were lugging baby photographs door to door with their soles flapping. Physicians were out selling skin lighteners and ship captains queued in hope of a cabin boy's mop and pail. / Offices of great fire insurance companies went up in smoke, which seemed no more than just. When the fire department – long unpaid – cleared off, little remained but scorched files, swivel-chairs on which no one would ever swivel again, lovely heaps of frosted glass, and all that mahogany. / All that mahogany that hadn't helped anybody but brokers after all. Then the brokers began jumping off rooftops with no greater consideration for those passing below than they'd had when their luck was running. Emperors of industry snatched all the loose cash on which they could lay hand and made one fast last run. Lawyers sued one another just to keep in practice."

"When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only one way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough. If everybody has more than enough, what good is my more-than-enough? What good is a wide meadow open to everyone? It isn't until others are fenced out that the open pasture begins to have real value. What good is being a major if you can't have more than a second lieutenant? What good is a second lieutenant for that matter?"

"‘Dear friends and gentle hearts,’ [the King of the Turtles] wigwagged, feeling the final cold creep up – ‘Will you stand by to leave your old friend die? I wanted nothing for myself – money, comfort, power, security – I worked for these only because those dear to me wanted them. (Of course, as long as they were handy I shared them from time to time.) Would you really leave me here to die? / True, I ate well. But that was only to keep up my strength for the sacrificial ordeal of my days. For I never knowingly harmed a fellow creature unless he got in my way. I never took unfair advantage unless it profited me. Can you really leave so lovely a turtle to die? / A devoted father, a loyal citizen, a faithful employee, a kind employer, a considerate neighbor, a regular church-goer. Out of purity of heart I respected the laws of God and man. Purity, and fear of jail. Could you really stand by and watch so saintly a turtle die? / I seemed a bit intent a moment ago, you say, on grinding my brothers' necks to gristle? I confess – but that was a moment ago, and now I've changed my ways. Could you bear to see such an open-minded turtle die?’"

"That was no town for the aged or the aging. There was love behind the curtains and love behind the doors. Love in the squares and circles and love along the curbs. / Particularly along those curbs west of the Southern Railway Station. Where every window framed some love bird lamed in flight. Where every screen door was a cage. What had been Storyville was now an aviary. / [...] / From wheatland and tenement, hotel and harbor, girls and women of a hundred feathers had come to nest both sides of South Basin. Girls downy as chicks who have just lost their mammas and chorus-line dolls who had long lost their down. Girls who came scolding like winter jays, ruffing their tail feathers and ready for battle. But some like little wrens of summer, seeking hollows to hide in forever. / [...] / Birds of a hundred varied feathers, hooters, hissers, howlers, quackers – it was a new kind of zoo wherein the captured foraged for themselves."

"When his eyes had got used to the deep-sea light he discerned a Negro the size of Carnera, naked to the waist and shining with iron-colored sweat, decapitating snapping turtles with silvered precision. / Now the trouble with turtles is that they believe all things come to him who will but struggle. There's always room at the top for one more, they think. And in this strange faith the snapping kind is of all the most devout. For it's precisely that that makes them the snapping kind. Though the way be steep and bloody, that doesn't matter so long as you reach the top of the bleeding heap. / [...] / Dove didn't hesitate. ‘I'll take the tarpon soup.’ / He didn't yet know that there was also room for one more at the bottom."

"‘Mister, I'll cook, I'll cuss, I'll mend yer socks, I'll stoke yer engines 'r catch you a damn whale barehand. [...]’ / ‘You do know that there is a seafaring man's union?’ He gave Dove the benefit of a serious doubt. / ‘Mister, I'm a Christian boy and don't truckle to Yankee notions. Put my name in your ship's dinner-pot and you're my captain, I'm your hand. Just tell me ever-what you want done and I'll 'tend it, for I'm bedcord strong. If I don't turn you out what in your eyes makes a fair day's work you can put me off at the first port of call. Aint that fair enough?’ / ‘Mighty fair, son. If more boys were willing to work for nothing there'd be just that many more millionaires.’"

"Three shots of corn likker and the whole stuffed zoo – Moose, Elks, Woodmen, Lions, Thirty-Third Degree Owls and Forty-Fourth Degree Field Mice begin to conspire against the very laws they themselves have written. / It was all right to take a slug of whiskey from your own flask in a taxi, but forbidden on a trolley-car. That didn't help those who rode trolley-cars. You couldn't carry liquor down the street, but if you owned a car you just bypassed that. For every statute they had a little loophole – that by coincidence fitted their own figures as if measured for them. Those who had no hand in writing statutes – panders and madams and such as that – had a harder time squeezing through. / It was an ancestral treachery that all do-righters practice."