"But what about church attendance figures?" ventured Harriet. "Aren't modern people supposed to be feeling a lack in their lives that they need relig… - Mary McCarthy

Her [Helena's] light, mildly aseptic irony was wasted on Norine, who was unaware of irony and humorous vocal shadings; she listened only to the overt content of what was said and drew her own blunt inferences.

When I go it will have to be by gondola because I have so much baggage. Some private Charon of the signora's will ferry me down to the station in his shabby funeral bark. That is how the Allies took Venice, arriving from the mainland, at the end of the second World War. There was a petrol shortage, and the Allied command, having made secret contact with the gondoliers' co-operative, officially 'captured' Venice with a fleet of gondolas. Even war in Venice evokes a disbelieving smile.

Humanly speaking, of course, she and Alma had the same right as anybody else to interfere in what was none of their business, the duty, in fact, of the bystander to interfere between father and son, employer and employee, state and subject, to protect elementary human rights and secure fair treatment for the weaker. Yet today's fashion was to disguise this moral feeling in an expedient garb, […] to 'sell' a moral argument in terms of a higher utility.