Dangerous Ages by Rose Macaulay

Through the late September and October days Gerda would lie on a wicker couch in the conservatory at Windover, her sprained leg up, her broken wrist on a splint, her mending head on a soft pillow, and eat pears. Grapes too, apples, figs, chocolates of course -- but particularly pears. She also wrote verse, and letters to Barry, and drew in pen and ink, and read Sir Leo Chiozza Money's Triumph of Nationalisation and Mrs. Snowden on Bolshevik Russia, and Lady Adela, and Côterie, and listened while Neville read Mr. W. H. Mallock's Memoirs and Disraeli's Life. Her grandmother (Rodney's mother) sent her The Diary of Opal Whiteley, but so terrible did she find it that it caused a relapse, and Neville had to remove it. She occasionally struggled in vain with a modern novel, which she usually renounced in perplexity after three chapters or so. Her taste did not lie in this direction.

"I can't understand what they're all about," she said to Neville. "Poetry means something. It's about something real, something that really is so. So are books like this -- " she indicated The Triumph of Nationalisation. "But most novels are so queer. They're about people, but not people as they are. They're not interesting."