Enter Sir Robert Quotes

“Do you know what I think, mother?” said Edith, who was in her usual tidy way plumping up the cushions and generally putting things straight. “No, darling,” said her mother.
“What is it?”
“Well, it’s rather difficult to explain,” said Edith. “It’s about George and John-Arthur. I’d like to marry them both.”
― Angela Thirkell, Enter Sir Robert

“If your own private world crumbles, as it had with nearly every landowner in England, you involve yourself in your own virtue (we translate by sound rather than by sense, though one can give almost any word or phrase of Horace a round dozen of meanings, so different is the Roman genius from ours) and try to bear up impavidly among its ruins. But when the whole world is crumbling it is daily more difficult to remain just and tenacious of your proposition (as Miss Lydia Keith rendered it, a long time ago) and very often small thanks you get for doing it.”
― Angela Thirkell, Enter Sir Robert

“Mr. Cross, who was digging up dandelions on the lawn with a spud, came up to the car and courteously helped them out, which really makes the getting out more difficult, for there are only two ways of getting out of an ordinary small car: the one, to slide your legs out first and somehow get your skirt and the rest of you to follow rather like coming down a fire escape, the other to get out with your back to the audience and not care what it looks like.”
― Angela Thirkell, Enter Sir Robert

“A week or so later the Vicar rang up to ask if he could come and see Lady Graham. Most of us would at once have had a (quite unnecessary) attack of conscience and wondered if we had been accused of brawling in church or coveting our neighbour’s maidservant (a sin which has now, by force of circumstances, become Common Usage).”
― Angela Thirkell, Enter Sir Robert

“It was too cold to sit outside and watch the harvest moon across the river valley, so they sat in the drawing-room and Mrs. Halliday said it would be nice to have a fire. George lit it. It flared and died down. Good advice flowed over George from every side. Mrs. Halliday said she had told Hubback how to lay a fire for at least twenty years and that was the result.
First some shavings, she said, and Caxton always had plenty, or very small chips of pine or fir; only Hubback wouldn’t go to the carpenter’s shed for them and Caxton wouldn’t bring them into the drawing-room. Meanwhile George rearranged the fire and relit it. After a few sulks it began to crackle and then to blaze. George put dry pine cones on it and a couple of logs and it settled down to burn properly.
“But couldn’t he leave the shavings at the back door?” said Edith.
“You see,” said Mrs. Halliday, “if he left them there, and he might if I spoke to him myself, Hubback wouldn’t bring them into the house.”
“But couldn’t you tell him to bring them into the drawing-room?” said Edith, who had much of the Pomfret tenacity of purpose.
“I could, my dear. Indeed I quite often have,” said Mrs. Halliday, without complaint, merely stating an ineluctable law of nature. “But he always manages not to hear.”
“Well, then, couldn’t Hubback bring them from the back door to the drawing-room?” said Edith.
“No,” said Mrs. Halliday. “You see it isn’t her place to do it,” and this she said with such simplicity that Edith could not for the life of her tell whether her hostess believed what she said or not. Our own opinion, for what it is worth, is that Mrs. Halliday was feeling older and more tired than she liked to admit and was prepared to let things pass that earlier she would have fought and conquered.”
― Angela Thirkell, Enter Sir Robert