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

‘You see, Wilmet, Marius has asked me to marry him — that’s what I’ve been wanting to tell you. Do you think it’s so very dreadful of him?’

I could hardly confess my first reaction to her news, which was the perhaps typically feminine one of astonishment that such a good looking man as Marius Ransome should want to marry anyone so dim and mousy as Mary Beamish.

— A Glass of Blessings, chapter twenty

‘I suppose I ought not to say this, but she was a bit keen on me at one time.’

Penelope smiled to herself at the old-fashioned phrase ‘a bit keen on me’. It seemed to make him rather ‘caddish’ in a way that men weren’t nowadays. She took a sip of brandy, wondering what he expected her to say. Then she realised that he was smiling at her indulgently and it suddenly occurred to her that he was one of those men who imagine that all women are running after them. So she had got herself into another of her ludicrous situations.

— An Unsuitable Attachment, chapter fifteen

There may be an unlimited number of things that can happen to the ordinary person, but there are only a few twists to the man-woman story.

— A Few Green Leaves, chapter fourteen

Tears, thought by some to be a woman’s most powerful weapon, did not of course move him, but he was good at comforting weeping women. There had been quite a number of them in his life, from his mother to older women and young girls who had been foolish enough to expect more than he was prepared to give. He had seen with distaste many a red face working and blotched with tears…Older women especially were most unwise to cry, it was ruination to their appearance.

— The Sweet Dove Died, chapter twenty-four

‘Mind if I wash first?’

‘No — you do. I won’t look,’ said Sister Dew coyly.

‘Oh, I don’t mind. After all we’re all made alike.’

‘Well, not quite, Miss Pettigrew.’

‘No — male and female created He them, more or less, or as near as makes no matter,’ said Daisy. ‘But you and I are too old to have any false modesty.’ And with this she stripped off her nightdress, and flung it on the bed and advanced to the wash basin.

Sister Dew was so surprised that she forgot to look the other way.

— An Unsuitable Attachment, chapter fifteen

Sister Dew lay in bed, uncertain whether to get up or to pretend that she was not yet awake. She turned over to look at her watch on the table between the two beds. Twenty past seven. Daisy was taking up more than her share of the table with a guide-book, a Bible, two novels, and a large bottle of Kitzymes, which Sister Dew happened to know were yeast tablets for cats. Surely she didn’t take them herself?

— An Unsuitable Attachment, chapter fifteen

‘What was her name?’ he asked with a faint show of interest.

‘Oh, I don’t know. She was tall with greyish eyes and brown hair, not pretty but quite a pleasant face.’

‘Oh, Mildred,’ he looked at me seriously, ‘there were so many. I couldn’t possibly recognise her from that description — “not pretty but quite a pleasant face” — most Englishwomen look like that, you know.’

I realised that it was probably how I looked myself and was sad to think that after a year or two he might not remember me either.

— Excellent Women, chapter fifteen

‘…I thought it would be nice if you got to know each other better, became friends, you know.’

‘Yes, men do seem to like the women they know to become friends,’ I remarked, but then it occurred to me that of course it is usually their old and new loves whom they wish to force into friendship. I even remembered Bernard Hatherley, the lay-reader bank clerk, saying about the girl he had met on holiday in Torquay, ‘You would like her so much — I hope you’ll become friends.’ But as I had been at home in my village and she had been in Torquay the acquaintance had never prospered.

— Excellent Women, chapter fifteen

‘I think it’s much better to keep men in the dark about one’s plans, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I said uncertainly, feeling myself at a disadvantage in never having been in the position to keep a man in the dark about anything.

— Excellent Women, chapter fourteen