Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

One Monday forenoon, in December I think, Pratt asked me to come over for a talk. Dolly's last report had been poor, I knew. But instead of contenting myself with some such plausible explanation of this summons, I imagined all sort of horrors, and had to fortify myself with a pint of my "pin" before I could face the interview. Slowly, all Adam's apple and heart, I went up the steps of the scaffold.

A huge women, gray-haired, frowsy, with a broad flat nose and small eyes behind black-rimmed glasses-"Sit down," she said, pointing to an informal and humiliating hassock, while she perched with ponderous spryness on the arm of an oak chair. For a moment or two, she peered at me with smiling curiosity. She had done it at our first meeting, I recalled, but I could afford then to scowl back. Her eye left me. She lapsed into thought-probably assumed. Making up her mind she rubbed, fold on fold, her dark gray flannel skirt at the knee, dispelling a trace of chalk or something. Then she said, still rubbing, not looking up: "Let me ask a blunt question, Mr. Haze. You are an old-fashioned Continental father, aren't you?" "Why, no," I said, "conservative, perhaps, but not what you would call old-fashioned." She sighed, frowned, then clapped her big plump hands together in a let's-getdown-to-business manner, and again fixed her beady eyes upon me.