Sink or Swim? , Volume I

"If I hadn't heard it from Mrs. Clay herself, I never would have believed it! To think that John Beacham, who's a sensible man as men go, should be marrying an Irishwoman! If Honor Blake was English-born now, one wouldn't blame him so much; but to choose a girl that comes of people who, as everyone knows, you can't trust farther than you can see them, is what I call a sin and a shame."

The speaker was a woman of low stature, elderly, and sharp of voice and feature. She was seated at a round old-fashioned mahogany table, on which a teapot of the material known as Britannia metal steamed with a pleasant warmth, while the odour of buttered toast, "hot and hot," filled the little room in which she and a chosen chum and gossip had met together to talk over the domestic affairs of their friends and neighbours.