An Act in a Backwater by E.F. Benson — Read

One evening, about a fortnight after the attack of congestion in Bolton Street, Canon and Mrs. Collingwood were sitting in their dining-room lingering over their dessert. The butler had filled their claret-glasses to the brim with water, and had left the room. It was a warm night in mid-July, and the French window opening on to the garden was flung wide, admitting breaths of soft and flower-scented air. The dusk was not yet passed the bounding line between day and night, and the eye was led over a cool, spacious square of grass, framed in flower-beds in which colour still lingered, to a red brick wall at the end of the garden over which rose the gray pinnacle of the Cathedral. It was still near enough to midsummer to dine without candles if your dinner-hour was 7.45, and the absence of them and decanters gave to the table a certain virginal and ascetic air.

Both the Canon and his wife were teetotalers, she of the kind which we may call intemperate -- that is to say, she regarded alcohol not only as poison, but as an essentially immoral thing. Mrs. Collingwood was a woman of strong will, and ruled her husband; and though his own inclination would have been to set wine before his guests when they were entertaining, her detestation of fermented liquids overruled hospitality, and, unless one particular person was dining with them, you would no more see a decanter on the table than you would see a roulette board. But the exception was made in favour of their Bishop, who was under doctor's orders to drink the abominable thing, and on these occasions a half bottle of Burgundy blushed before Mrs. Collingwood's eyes. How exactly it is possible to conceive of a natural and lifeless product as being in itself wicked is a problem at which the ordinary mind stumbles.