Looking out of the club window into —hers was an economical club, but convenient for , where she lived, and for 's, where she shopped—Mrs. Wilkins, h… - Elizabeth von Arnim

She was an exceedingly pretty girl, who ought to have been enjoying herself. She had a soft, irregular face, charming eyes, dimples, a pleasant laugh, and limbs were long and slender. Certainly she ought to have been enjoying herself. Instead, she wasted her time in that foolish pondering over the puzzles of existence, over those unanswerable whys and wherefores, which is as a rule restricted, among women, to the elderly and plain.

... Books have their idiosyncrasies as well as people, and will not show me their full beauties unless the place and time in which they are read suits them. If, for instance, I cannot read Thoreau in a drawing-room, how much less would I ever dream of reading Boswell in the grass by a pond! Imagine carrying him off in company with his great friend to a lonely dell in a rye-field, and expecting them to be entertaining. "Nay, my dear lady," the great man would say in mighty tones of rebuke, "this will never do. Lie in a rye-field? What folly is that? And who would converse in a damp hollow that can help it?" So I read and laugh over my Boswell in the library when the lamps are lit, buried in cushion and surrounded by every sign of civilisation, with the drawn curtains shutting out the garden and the country solitude so much disliked by both sage and disciple. Indeed, It is Bozzy who asserts that in the country the only things that make him happy are meals.

Father was very pleasant indeed, if faintly apologetic — not embarrassed, for he was never that, but there was a faint flavour of apology in his manner, which was perhaps not to be wondered at, since his new wife was ever so much younger, one could see at once, than his daughter, and he sixty-five. "You mustn't think, Jennifer," he said after , which had been the oddest meal of her life, as he called her into the back diningroom where protected by folding doors from anything that might be going on in the front one, they had worked together so long — she the obedient handmaid waiting on his thoughts, taking them down as they emerged from him, typing and retyping them, over and over again with dogged patience typing a single paragraph, a single sentence, sometimes for days working on a single sentence till it was, in father's eyes, as near perfect as it could humanly be got, — "you mustn't think, Jennifer," he said, "that I've sprung this on you unfairly."