fiefoe

I simply didn't expect to enjoy reading Elizabeth Taylor so much. Our heroine's nearest and dearest:

Roddy - that leader of men, who did not know how the world lived, discounting all those who do not go to nursing homes...
Such reflections were always thrown away upon Roddy. "I have never complained about your pastry," he assured her and then, remembering some book or other,.. he basely and unnecessarily betrayed his own mother. "Her pastry is always heavier than yours," he concluded.
Roddy shouted. "Education leads us forth into adult life, where prying and spying just do not happen."

Just before the library was to be shut for lunch-time, he went to the shelf and kissed the two books which would lie on either side of his Lorna where she was returned.
He had come across many odd and appalling conditions in his reading,.. but this madness of Mrs Rochester's was his most formidable experience as yet.
Oliver's patience, when he was ill, was almost disconcerting. "The child's a born invalid," Roddy would say.
He had never found himself in congenial surroundings and now looked at it all as if it were a description in a book, which bored him, but which he was not compelled to read.
Oliver, when his amusement had died down, began to feel he owed his parents some kindness. He was touched that his father had gone to such lengths to bring about his existence and that Julia should have been so bored. 'I must try to be a better son,' he thought. 'I will run wild more and please them.'

She could not forgive Julia for wanting more than her own dearest dream.
Eleanor, who thought this vagueness about rank an affectation,
She bothered a little more about her dignity, and her position, than do the majority of married women, and betrayed herself by what Roddy caller her 'little ways', by which he meant the trivial comforts, consolations, cups of tea.. and a gentle fussing which grows insidiously upon and characterizes those who have neither husband nor children to cherish and only themselves to put first.

"At Mrs Lippincote's" (Reply)