Daily Pym

‘Poor Mr. Driver — it seems unkind to leave him all alone this evening.’ 

‘Yes,’ Miss Doggett agreed. ‘One does feel that men need company more than women do. A woman has a thousand and one little tasks in the house, and then her knitting or sewing.’

Jane, who did not seem to have these things, made no answer.

— Jane & Prudence, chapter eleven

‘Jumble’s on the bed,’ said Miss Doggett. ‘We have put the things we think might do for the distressed gentlewomen on the chaise-longue.’

‘How very suitable to put them there!’ Jane burst out.

— Jane & Prudence, chapter eleven

‘She was much too good for him,’ said Miss Doggett, taking a pair of the shoes into her hand. ‘I often wondered how they ever came to be married. These lizard courts — they cost eight guineas, I remember Constance telling me. She had to have them specially made, such a very narrow foot she had.’

— Jane & Prudence, chapter eleven

‘I suppose everything is all right between you and Fabian?’ she began tentatively.

‘All right? Why, yes.’

‘I mean, there’s nothing wrong between you,’ Jane laboured, using an expression she had sometimes seen in the cheaper women’s papers where girls asked how they should behave when their boy-friends wanted them to ‘do wrong’.

‘But I don’t understand you, Jane. Did you think we’d quarrelled or something? Because we certainly haven’t, I can assure you.’

‘No, it wasn’t that. I don’t seem to be putting it very clearly, what I was trying to ask was, are you Fabian’s mistress?’ As soon as she had said it, Jane found herself wanting to laugh. It was such a ridiculous word; it reminded her of full-blown Restoration comedy women or Nell Gwynn or Edwardian ladies kept in pretty little houses with wrought-iron balconies in St. John’s Wood.

— Jane and Prudence, chapter twelve

When Jane got into the house she found Nicholas standing in the hall with a parcel in his hand. The absurd first-evening-of-spring feeling came back to her suddenly and she wondered if he had perhaps felt it too and brought her a present.

‘Look,’ he said undoing the wrapping. ‘I thought I’d put them in my little cloakroom downstairs.’

On the table stood four soap animals in various colours, a bear, a rabbit, an elephant and a tortoise.

‘Kiddisoaps, for children, really,’ he explained. ‘I shall arrange them on the glass shelf.’ He went happily away, humming to himself.

If it is true that men only want one thing, Jane asked herself, is it perhaps just to be left to themselves with their soap animals or some other harmless little trifle?

‘Darling,’ she called out, ‘what do you think…?’

‘I shall use the tortoise first,’ her husband was saying in his little cloakroom.

— Jane and Prudence, chapter 13 (submitted by Jeanette Molzer)

Prudence’s flat was in the kind of block where Jane imagined people might be found dead, though she had never said this to Prudence herself; it seemed rather a macabre fancy and not one to be confided to an unmarried woman living alone.

— Jane and Prudence, chapter twelve

‘You’ve got a new dressing-gown,’ she said, trying to keep out of her tone the accusing note that women are apt to use to each other, as if one had no business to spend one’s own money on nice clothes.

— Jane and Prudence, chapter twelve

‘Edward is so tired,’ she said; ‘It’s really a nice rest for him to come down here. That speech yesterday took a lot out of him.’

That speech? Jane never followed the proceedings of Parliament, but she could imagine quite well what a young man of his party might have said, so she said cheerfully, ‘Yes; it must have done. Very fine, I should think it must have been. That bit about Youth and the Empire,’ she hazarded.

— Jane and Prudence, chapter nine

‘I’ve been such a failure as a clergyman’s wife,’ Jane lamented, ‘but at least I don’t drink; that’s the only suitable thing about me.’

‘Well, clergymen’s wives don’t really drink, do they?’ said Prudence…’That doesn’t seem to be one of their vices.’

‘So even my not drinking isn’t an advantage,’ said Jane. ‘I might just as well take to it, then.’ She poured herself a full glass of sherry.

— Jane and Prudence, chapter eight