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Just about feel off my chair laughing! Benson is wonderful!

“…such a fine big man, was a much more valuable social nucleus in the house, for in his robust hectoring way he kept things up to the mark…and laid down the law at bridge, and made it seem an honour to play with him. Of course he lost his temper, and had tantrums, but then he recovered it again and made a fresh record on his bicycle. He was an asset… a Colonel was better than a plain Miss to rally round.”

“Florence felt moreover with the infallible certainty of instinct that the other was not one who cared much or indeed at all for the companionship or affection of men, and in this she recognised a secret kinship of nature with herself. Yet at present Miss Howard had no devoted friend or she would not be living at Wentworth in this unattached manner, and Florence longed to take a place that was clearly vacant.”

“Miss Howard's chance of matrimony, had she only known it was soaring upwards as on eagle's wings. She had said nothing really definite but a great deal that was truly impressive in a vague and sumptuous manner. Colonel Chase allowed his imagination to run riot and it flowered into a paved courtyard with a sundial, and a gallery-room with Queen Anne furniture and portraits.”

“She was thoroughly depressed, for apart from the expense, and from the approaching difficulty of knowing what to do with a stack of nearly fifty framed pictures there was the far more bitter loss of prestige. As long as she had not tempted Fate in this manner, she had been the accredited fount of artistic authority at Wentworth...“

“ "You don't seem to have had any purchasers as yet," went on this dreadful young man, "but I'll give you a tip about that, miss. You tell that young buttons who wanted me to pay sixpence, to fix labels on to half of them to say they're sold, see? You bet other people will begin buying them then, for fear they should be too late. Just make them think that if they're not slippy everything'll be gone, see?”

“"No, I've not been here before," he said. "I just had a look at the catalogue, and wrote my stuff on that." Poor Miss Howard felt her last support slip from her. Hitherto she had clung to the comforting knowledge that though visitors might be few and purchasers completely non-existent, the trained eye of the professional critic had appreciated and admired. Now that consolation was gone.”

“Colonel Chase's moment had arrived…Wentworth violently led the otherwise tame applause…Wentworth rocked with laughter but Mrs. Oxney heard Lady Appledore say to her companion, 'I am never amused, Miss Jobson, at jokes about the Church,' and she remembered with dismay that the story of the Dean was coming and that her ladyship was the daughter of one.”

“”I've got to see about my little pickies being framed…I'm going to hold a little teeny picture-exhibition of some of my rubbishy sketches…nobody would give me any peace until I promised to." This was approximately though not precisely true: Miss Howard had told the group in the lounge that Mrs. Bowen had said that everyone was longing for her to do so, and the group in the lounge had all said "Oh, you must!"”

“The patients dispersed to their rooms for the prescribed hour's rest after their baths. Though Mrs. Bliss said that she was not going to rest at all, but just lie quiet on her bed and do an hour's strenuous work denying illness and pain, there was a superficial resemblance between her procedure and that of the others, for they all lay on bed or sofa, and kept quiet. . . .”

“ "Do go on telling my father about illness being a delusion," she said. "It would be lovely if you could convince him of it." Mrs. Bliss was delighted to do so; nothing could possibly be easier than to convince anybody of a self-evident proposition, but owing to the apparently piercing cold of the dining-room, they adjourned to the lounge...”

“She was ready for bed now, and still under the inspiration of the revolt which Mrs. Holders had made against the authority and omniscience of Colonel Chase, she asked herself what would happen if she refused to be eternally dragged about from Spa to Spa. Naturally she could not throw off so chronic a yoke with one comprehensive gesture of defiance; she would have to begin gently…”

“…for five years, Florence had been his enslaved companion. She knew well that her interminable ministries to him were not performed out of the bounty of love, but from her own acquiescence in being crushed, and now it struck her that she thoroughly disliked him.”

“…her mother, who had always been frail…simply came to the end of her vitality, and exhausted by her husband's vampirism had stopped living. She had been possessed of a considerable fortune, half of which…she had left to Florence absolutely, the remainder to her husband for life. This appeared to him the most ungrateful return for all the care he had allowed her to take of him…”

Col. Chase: “At Wentworth similarly, his bicycle rides, his excellent meals, his comfortable bedroom supplied his physical wants and he had the additional mental satisfaction of being undisputed cock of the walk, whereas among the members at his club there was a sad tendency to think themselves as good as he.”

“…Colonel Chase was explaining to a sycophantic audience where he had gone, and it was unanimously decided that he must have ridden at least thirty-eight miles, which was indeed joyful. He decided in consequence to forgive Miss Howard for being late for lunch…"I'll enter it as thirty-eight miles then in my logbook," he said, "if you all insist on it.””

“Miss Howard, in fact, though girlish, suffered from the essentially middle-aged disease of fabrication, and whether she looked at her physical image in the tall looking-glass in her bedroom, or contemplated herself in the mirror of her mind, she now saw what she had got to believe about herself.”

“ It was not that she felt any profound passion for tripping, warbling and squatting, but from constantly telling herself that she was barely out of her teens she had got to believe in her girlishness and behaved accordingly. Her imagination (here was the root of the matter) was incessantly exercised on herself, and she imagined all sorts of things about herself that had little or no foundation in fact.”

“Miss Alice Howard was a pathetic person, though she would have been very much surprised if anyone had told her so. She had been an extremely pretty girl, lively and intelligent and facile, but…had never married, and now at the age of forty, though she had parted with her youth, she had relinquished no atom of her girlishness. She hardly ever walked, but tripped, she warbled little snatches of song...”

“Amy sighed: there was resignation more than relief in her sigh. "Anyhow the coal is getting low enough," she said to console herself. "I'm sure I don't see how we shall keep the house open at all, when we have to begin fires in the rooms, unless you mean to burn coke in them… I'm not sure that it wouldn't be better to shut Wentworth up altogether when the frosts begin.”

“ Wentworth, on the other hand, was so entirely and magnificently detached that nobody would dream of calling it detached at all: you might as well call a ship at sea detached. The nearest house to it was at least a hundred yards away, and on all sides but one more like a quarter of a mile, and the whole of that territory was 'grounds.'”