‘Did you fall in love with him that evening at the parish hall?’ I asked. ‘It would be wonderful to think that love could blossom in such surroundings.’ I thought of the chipped Della Robbia plaques, the hissing of gas fires and tea urns and the curious smell of damp mackintoshes that seemed to pervade it, and perhaps all parish halls everywhere. Why, indeed, shouldn’t love blossom here rather more than in conventional romantic surroundings?
— A Glass of Blessings, chapter twenty
