" During our own requisite holidays at the great house, we spent hours chasing Dev through rooms big as skating rinks packed with costly breakables, which we weren’t allowed to move out of kid reach. A sofa lined with antique dolls stared at Dev with insouciant porcelain faces he squirmed in my arms to get at. Once, from exhausted spite, I let him smash one. As for Mr. Whitbread, he seemed to eye Dev’s festive ramblings as he might have a cockroach’s. He once made the boy cry by calling him—beyond my earshot, of course—an ignorant little crud. Dev’s teary response, which Warren reported—You’re a big fat man with a red nose—proved Dev had enough Texan in him to take the patriarch in a verbal tussle. "

― Mary Karr , Lit