Robin Linnet by E.F. Benson — Read

Lady Grote did not consider it part of her duties as a hostess to appear at breakfast on Sunday morning; indeed, she would have considered it rather a breach of them to do so. The women of the party had their breakfasts in their own rooms, and she knew quite enough of men to be sure that, however sprightly in disposition, they vastly prefer a smoking-room kind of meal, sitting sideways to the table, not speaking unless they feel disposed, and with the power of erecting a palisade round themselves by a propped-up morning paper, to making themselves agreeable, even to the woman who most engaged their attention the evening before.

The Frenchman is differently constituted, and at however immature an hour likes to take up again, as near as possible to the point at which he left it, his mood of the evening before; but upon the English mind sleep seems to leave a sort of tarnish which must be scoured off in silence with fish and sausages before it becomes an agreeable and polished surface again. Then, after a round of golf or a game of tennis for those who require "exposure," like a photograph, before their proper image reappears, or an hour or so in an armchair in a well-shaded light for those to whom, like a mushroom, darkness and warmth are necessary for their morning development, the Saturday-till-Monday Englishman finds that the burden of life is light again.