“Afterwards, they always had tea in the kitchen, much the nicest room in the house.”

“A Proper Tea is much nicer than a Very Nearly Tea, which is one you forget about afterwards.”

“The magnificent houses, the three old-money brick houses, each with a small turret and a wraparound porch, had been built uptown near the churches when the town was younger and smaller, before the Great War. The wraparound porches were there to hold rainy-day children and morning tea carts and quiet late-evening converstion, cosy, discreet conversation which could not easily take place in front rooms or kitchens or bedrooms, certainly not on the street.”

“There's always room for improvement, it's the biggest room in the house.”

“Also, he had always had a great tolerance which seemed the nicest thing about him if it were not the most sinister.”

“Sometimes, waking early before the others, wandering the rooms wrapped in a blanket or drinking my tea in the empty kitchen, I had that most rare of feelings, the sense that the world, so consistently overwhelming and incomprehensible, in fact has an order, oblique as it may seem, and I a place within it.”