I made myself what seemed an extravagant lunch of two scrambled eggs, preceded by the remains of some soup and followed by cheese, biscuits and an apple. I was glad that I wasn’t a man, or the kind of man who looked upon a meal alone as a good opportunity to cook a small plover, though I should have been glad enough to have somebody else cook it fo

‘This teapot’s heavy,’ she said lifting it with both hands and placing it on the table. ‘You’d think one of the men might help to carry it,’ she added, raising her voice. Mr Mallet and Mr Conybeare, the churchwardens, and Mr Gamble, the treasurer, looked up from their business, which they were conducting in a secret masculine way with many papers s

‘What will you do after we’ve gone?’ Helena asked. ‘Well, she had a life before we came,’ Rocky reminded her. ‘Very much so – what is known as a full life, with clergymen and jumble sales and church services and good works.’

It seemed that husbands and wives could part and come together again, and I was glad that it should be so, but what happened after that? It is said that people are refined and ennobled by suffering and one knows that they sometimes are, but would Helena have learned to be neater in the kitchen, or Rocky to share her interest in matrilineal kin-grou

He had not chosen them, had not gone into a shop for that purpose, they had just happened to be there. If he had gone into a shop and chosen them … I pulled myself up and told myself to stop these ridiculous thoughts, wondering why it is that we can never stop trying to analyse the motives of people who have no personal interest in us, in the vain

‘I know the kind of person I should like to marry,’ he went on, ‘and I thought I had found her. But perhaps I looked too far and there might have been somebody nearer at hand.’ I stared into the electric fire and wished it had been a coal one, though the functional glowing bar was probably more suitable for this kind of occasion. ‘I cannot see what

I would have a rest this afternoon, for Winifred had gone back to the vicarage and was comforting Julian. I felt a little sorry for him, surrounded as he would be by excellent women. But at least he would be safe from people like Mrs Gray; Sister Blatt would defend him fiercely against all such perils, I knew. Perhaps it might after all be my duty

‘This may sound a cynical thing to say, but don’t you think men sometimes leave difficulties to be solved by other people or to solve themselves?

I suddenly felt very tired and thought how all over England, and perhaps, indeed, anywhere where there was a church and a group of workers, these little frictions were going on. Somebody else decorating the pulpit when another had always done it, somebody’s gift of flowers being relegated to an obscure window, somebody’s cleaning of the brasses bei