“Duh, why didn't you just kill her?" Lisa asked, annoyed. "Two more seconds and it would have been justifiable vampicide.""Lis, for all we know, she volunteers weekends at the soup kitchen.”

“It was your first time?"Her head snapped up, eyes stabbing her sister."Of course it was," Lisa backtracked at once, and then said, "Well, Fanny must have been wrong then. Or perhaps it is different for everyone."Suzette shook her head with disgust. "If you, who have known me all my life and know I have not been keeping company with men before this, doubts me, why would he not? He probably thinks I have been with half the royal navy.""Why would he think that? We live nowhere near the near the coast," Lisa said with confusion.Suzette glared at her and then shifted to get off the bed,crawling around her to do so."Where are you going?" Lisa asked, standing up."For a walk.""But I was going to read to you to cheer you up," Lisa protested."I don't want to be read to," Suzette said grimly as she slipped her shoes on."I could tell you a story," Lisa offered."No.""I could sing,or-""I want to be alone.”

“She opens her eyes slowly. It takes her a moment to adjust to the bright kitchen light, shining in her eyes. "Can we rearrange the furniture this weekend?" she asks sleepily. "So when I sleep out here, you don't shine all of Satan's fiery hell lights in my eyes first thing in the morning?”

“Who's this?" he said, coming across a name he didn't recognize. "Lady Georgina of Sandalhurst? Why are we inviting her? I don't know her. Why are we asking people we don't know?"I know her," Pauline replied. There was a certain steeliness in her voice that Halt would have done well to recognize. "She's my aunt, Bit of an old stick, really, but I have to invite her."You've never mentioned her before," Halt challenged.True. I don't like her very much. As I said, she's a bit of an old stick."Then why are we inviting her?"We're inviting her," Lady Pauline explained, "because Aunt Georgina has spent the last twenty years bemoaning the fact that I was unmarried. 'Poor Pauline!' she'd cry to anyone who'd listen. 'She'll be a lonley old maid! Married to her job! She'll never find a husband to look after her!' It's just too good an opportunity to miss."Halt's eyebrows came together in a frown. There might be a few things that would annoy him more than someone criticizing the woman he loved, but for a moment, he couldn't think of one.Agreed," he said. "And let's sit her with the most boring people possible at the wedding feast."Good thinking," Lady Pauline said. She made a note on another sheet of paper. "I'll make her the first person on the Bores' table."The Bores' table?" Halt said. "I'm not sure I've heard that term."Every wedding has to have a Bores' table," his fiance explained patiently. "We take all the boring, annoying, bombastic people and sit them together. That way they all bore each other and they don't bother the normal people we've asked."Wouldn't it be simpler to just ask the people you like?" Halt askede. "Except Aunt Georgina, of course--there's a good reason to ask her. But why ask others?"It's a family thing," Lady Pauline said, adding a second and third name to the Bores' table as she thought of them. "You have to ask family and every family has its share of annoying bores. It's just organizing a wedding.”

“Had she been in town, the two of them would have spent most of the day together, and she didn't want that. Then again, deep down, it was exactly what she wanted, leaving her more confused that she'd been in years. ”

“[Mom] said she didn't want her youngest daughter dressed in the thrift-store clothes the rest of us wore. Mom told us we would have to go shoplifting. "Isn't that a sin?" I asked Mom. "Not exactly," Mom said. "God doesn't mind you bending the rules a little if you have good reason. It's sort of like justifiable homicide. This is justifiable pilfering.”