Jane and Prudence

by Barbara Pym

When she and Nicholas were engaged Jane had taken great pleasure in imagining herself as a clergyman’s wife, starting with Trollope and working through the Victorian novelists to the present-day gallant, cheerful wives, who ran large houses and families on far too little money and sometimes wrote articles about it in the Church Times.

‘I expect they were all early at the butcher’s and got sausages,’ said Jane, ‘and now they are all eating toad-in-the-hole.’

‘Why did you say, “my husband can’t take toad”?’ asked Nicholas, shaking with suppressed laughter. ‘It sounded so very odd.’

Here he came to the large Methodist Chapel, but of course one couldn’t go there; none of the people one knew went to chapel, unless out of a kind of amused curiosity. Even if truth were to be found there.