Crampton Hodnet

There are no sick people in North Oxford. They are either dead or alive.It's sometimes difficult to tell the difference , that's all.

You lose your sense of perspective when you get too close, and the charm goes.

She knew exactly how she ought to feel, for she was well read in our greater and lesser English poets, but the unfortunate fact was that she did not really like being kissed at all.

Her chief work in life was interfering in other people's business and imposing her strong personality upon those who were weaker than herself.

Miss Morrow,’ said Miss Doggett in a warning tone, ‘you are not a woman of the world. You cannot possibly know what goes on outside Leamington Lodge.

It was only sometimes, when a spring day came in the middle of winter, that one had a sudden feeling that nothing was really impossible.

For, after all, respect and esteem were cold lifeless things—dry bones picked clean of flesh. There was nothing springlike about dry bones, nothing warm and romantic about respect and esteem.

Mrs. Wardell wagged her finger and stood up to go. ‘But you’re looking very nice in your blue velvet,’ she said. ‘I must rush off now. Old Dr. Fremantle and his wife are coming to supper. So depressing.’ She sighed. ‘Reminiscences of Oxford in the eighties, with a few daring little academic jokes. And poor Olive’s so dreary.

Even Miss Nollard and Miss Foxe, two dim North Oxford spinsters, were wearing new hats, and Miss Nollard’s hair looked suspiciously as if it had been waved. Only Mrs. Wardell remained reassuringly the same. Everyone knew that the curiously out-of-season straw hat she wore was only her old garden hat trimmed with a bunch of cherries from Woolworth’s, and some with sharper eyes were able to notice that the cherries had been sewn on with greenish darning wool, probably left in the needle after she had finished darning the vicar’s socks.

How could she explain to him what her love was like? That although it was a love stronger than death, it wasn’t the kind of love one *did* anything about?

She had somehow expected something less ordinary. And yet one must be reasonable and remember that falling in love is never ordinary to the people who indulge in it. Indeed