Explore "The Amateur Crime" by Anthony Berkeley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
To say that Mr. Priestley had been seriously perturbed by the vegetable accusations that had been hurled against him, would be to overstate the case; to say that he dismissed them immediately with complacent assurance from his mind, would be to trifle with the truth. During the few days that followed the young man's visit Mr. Priestley was at some pains to prove to himself over and over again that he could not, by any stretch of imagination, be truthfully termed a turnip. The outburst he explained with complete satisfaction as the spasmodic attempt of a nervous mentality, disordered by love, to convert the whole world to its own way of thinking and being; and he put the whole thing out of his mind as unworthy of serious consideration, exactly forty-eight separate times.
Yet these baseless insinuations of our friends, dismiss, explain or shelve them as we will, have a habit of rankling. We _know_ that they are baseless, because of course they are; but they rankle-perhaps out of their own sheer baselessness. It is extraordinarily annoying of them.