rake

Yes, I'm a man and everyone knows men are great hairy beasts scarcely tamed by civilization-Jermyn, Duke of Northcliff to Amy, Princess Beaumontaigne

For some reason Miss Jenner had seen fit to come uninvited to Sebastian__ home at a scandalously late hour. To make the situation even more compromising, she was unaccompanied__nd spending more than a half minute alone with Sebastian was sufficient to ruin any girl. He was debauched, amoral, and perversely proud of it. He excelled at his chosen occupation__hat of degenerate seducer__nd he had set a standard few rakes could aspire to.

He was moderately truthful towards men, but to women lied like a Cretan-a system of ethics above all others calculated to win popularity at the first flush of admission into lively society.

He with the cleanest clothes isn__ necessarily the cleanest.

Did he know she could barely think, let alone speak, for awareness of proximity of his fingers?Of course he knew. He was a rake. This is what he did.

He was the kind of young man whose handsome face has brought him plenty of success in the past and is now ever-ready for a new encounter, a fresh-experience, always eager to set off into the unknown territory of a little adventure, never taken by surprise because he has worked out everything in advance and is waiting to see what happens, a man who will never overlook any erotic opportunity, whose first glance probes every woman's sensuality, and explores it, without discriminating between his friend's wife and the parlour-maid who opens the door to him. Such men are described with a certain facile contempt as lady-killers, but the term has a nugget of truthful observation in it, for in fact all the passionate instincts of the chase are present in their ceaseless vigilance: the stalking of the prey, the excitement and mental cruelty of the kill. They are constantly on the alert, always ready and willing to follow the trail of an adventure to the very edge of the abyss. They are full of passion all the time, but it is the passion of a gambler rather than a lover, cold, calculating and dangerous. Some are so persistent that their whole lives, long after their youth is spent, are made an eternal adventure by this expectation. Each of their days is resolved into hundreds of small sensual experiences - a look exchanged in passing, a fleeting smile, knees brushing together as a couple sit opposite each other - and the year, in its own turn, dissolves into hundreds of such days in which sensuous experience is the constantly flowing, nourishing, inspiring source of life.

Rake your lifestyle. Gather all bitterness. Burn this bad attitude that has chocked the canals of your success. Be set free!

There was no mistake," he said. "You freely gave me a kiss because I kept silent about supposed engagement."Well, you could have been more gentlemanly about it," she said with a sniff."If I'd been gentlemanly, you wouldn't have enjoyed it half as much.

I steal from the rich to give to myself.

What do ladies wear beneath their riding trousers?""I would think an infamous rake would already know.""I was never infamous. In fact, I'm fairly standard as far as rakes go.""The ones who deny it are the worst.

If I am ever in the position where I wish to seduce someone I will simply assure her it__ better than rats.

Either way, he was always staring into a bottomless pit, or into a whirlpool that forever sucked him inexorably inward to its vortex.

If a wicked rake doesn__ kiss a young lady when they__e alone in a moonlit rose garden, might it mean he doesn__ intend to? There were rules about such things. Weren__ they written down somewhere? If not, then they should be. A Treatise on Rakes, written for Susceptible Young Ladies, by a Lady of Distinction.

Still pleasant as a cornered hedgehog, and as well mannered as a badger, I see.

It__ impossible,_ he snapped. __hy?_ __ecause I__ Sebastian, Lord St. Vincent. I can__ be celibate. Everyone knows that.

Why had she imagined he was attractive? He was absolutely the biggest, most complete and utter jackass she'd ever had the bad fortune to meet.