The Paying Guests

by Sarah Waters

‘It seems to me that “Victorian” is a word that’s used nowadays to dismiss all sorts of virtues over which people no longer wish to take the trouble.

‘What a thoroughly nice woman you are, Mrs Barber,’ she said. That made Mrs Barber look up with a smile of surprise. But she winced, too. ‘Oh, don’t say that.’ ‘Why not?’ ‘Well, because some day you’re sure to find out that it isn’t true, and then you’ll be disappointed in me.’

She felt as alive as a piece of radium.

The crowd was thinner than the crowds that Frances could recall from her rinking youth; it might have been made up solely of people who hadn’t yet twigged that thrills, these days, were to be had elsewhere—in jazz clubs, say, or cocaine houses.

her hat had an exotic Bond Street feather in it, the sort of feather that Frances, in her youth, had signed letters of petition against.

The rest of us become narrow and mean when we live falsely.

Didn’t they say that a woman had to enjoy it, in order for a pregnancy to take?