On such a footing...

      'I suppose I must help you, you devil,' said Maryon pleasantly, 'but what am I to say to Skipwith? I would like to be above-board with him as much as possible.'
      'Tell him I am a policeman on a holiday; you must not repeat anything about the drug.'
      Maryon got up and went to a bookshelf. There he fumbled about till out of a far corner he produced a dirty-looking book in an old-fashioned binding.
      'Here, listen to this,' he said, turning over the pages, he found his place and began to read: 'If I understand you rightly, you have formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to ... Consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What hav you been judging from? Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you. Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is  surrounded by a neighborhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay everywhere open?' There, that's what I say to you, only much better put than I can do it.'
      'That's good,' said McDonald, 'very good. Who wrote it?'
      'A parson's daughter -- more than a hundred years ago.'

from The Incredible Crime, a Cambridge mystery, by Lois Austen-Leigh

What is passing around me is a new job, and going from freelancing to (happily) working full time again, and a reasonable amount of reading, considering ... all good things, just not much leftover energy to write about it. But this mystery set in 1930s Cambridge, one of Britishh Library Crime Classics, by the parson's daughter's nephew's granddaughter, has been a nice part of all that.  I hope the last few weeks of your summer are as nice.  :)