Status Updates From Miss Pym Disposes

"You are being absurd, Lucy."
"I know, but I want Innes to be very much sought-after by five o'clock this afternoon."
Miss Hodge, who did not read Kipling-or indeed, acknowledge his existence-stared.

"It's Richard III on Friday night, so you wouldn't have to put up with me in a romantic effort. It isn't a good play, but the production is wonderful, even if it is I who say it that shouldn't."
"A criminal libel on a fine man, a blatant piece of political propaganda, and an extremely silly play," Lux opined.

[Foreshadowing Tey's takedown of Shakespeare's Tudor propaganda in The Daughter of Time (1951)]

They stood there on the gravel looking up at her, smiling. That was how she always remembered them afterwards. Standing there in the sunlight, easy and graceful; secure in their belief in the world's rightness and in their trust in each other. Untouched by doubt or blemish.

Walking through the summer garden Lucy found herself expatiating on herrings fried in oatmeal, and parkins, and Devonshire splits, and hot-pot, and collops, and other regional delicacies. She concealed the existence of the pork pie, which she privately considered a barbarism.

Lucy took The Young Visiters. It was a long time since she had read it last, but she found that she was smiling at the very sight of it. A sort of reflex action; quite involuntary. And when she looked up she found that Lux was smiling too.

Henrietta, it was to be understood, did not like to think of her beloved College as a Moloch. College was a bright gateway to the future for deserving youth; and if one or two found the gateway a hazard rather than an opening, then it was unfortunate but no reflection on the builders of the gateway.

She had just decided to be uncivilised and uncultured and "go in her mook" as her daily woman called it-after all, what was this immersion in water but a modern fad, and if Charles the Second could afford to smell a little high, who was she, a mere commoner, to girn at missing a bath? —