Commonplace Book

'"I've lost my mother."

"Do I understand you to mean that your mother is dead?"

"Oh, nothing so hackneyed. I don't think my mother will ever die as long as she can get credit. She was a Whortleford, you know, and the Whortleford's never waste anything..."'

from a play entitled The Watched Pot (Act I), in The Square Egg and other sketches by Saki