11
" She pottered round now, a tall vague woman in her early fifties, with a long pale face and brown eyes which her daughter Deirdre had inherited. As she pottered she murmured to herself, ‘large knives, small knives, pudding spoons, will they need forks too? Oh, large forks, serving spoons, mats, glasses, well two glasses in case Deirdre and Malcolm want to drink beer, Rhoda probably won’t … and now, wash the lettuce …’ It was nice when the warm weather came and they could have salads for supper, she thought, though why it was nice she didn’t really know. Washing a lettuce and cutting up the things to go with it was really almost as much trouble as cooking a hot meal, and she herself had never got over an old-fashioned dislike of eating raw green leaves. When her husband had been alive they had always had a hot meal in the evenings, winter and summer alike. He needed it after a day in the City. But now he was gone and Rhoda had been living with them for nearly ten years now and everyone said how nice it was for them both, to have each other, though of course she had the children too. Malcolm was a good solid young man, very much like his father, reliable and, although of course she never admitted it, a little dull. He did not seem to mind about the hot meal in the evenings. But Deirdre was different, clever and moody, rather like she herself had been at the same age, before marriage to a good dull man and life in a suburb had steadied her. "
― Barbara Pym , Less Than Angels
13
" The circumstances of her daily life, less usual now than fifty or a hundred years ago, were not conducive to an easy forgetting. While Delia and Felicity had been trained for careers, Elaine had been the one to stay at home. She might, if she had come upon them, have copied out Anne Elliot’s words, especially as she was the same age as Miss Austen’s heroine: ‘We certainly do not forget you so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always business of some sort or other to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.’ But Elaine was not much of a reader; she would have said that she had no time, which was perhaps just as well, even if she missed the consolation and pain of coming upon her feelings expressed for her in such moving words. "
― Barbara Pym , Less Than Angels