Never Too Late #978925

“There are too many Friends of Everything about.”
These words were spoken by the well-known novelist Mrs. Morland, in her comfortable but quite uninteresting house at High Rising, to Dr. Ford and the George Knoxes, the avant-garde as it were of a tea-party. Since we first met Mrs. Morland some twenty-odd years ago, that gifted creature had changed very little except that she was more vague and perhaps a little more uninterested in her clothes though with occasional spurts of buying a new suit or dress, then having to get a new pair of stays (as she firmly continued to call them, disdaining such words as corset, or belt) and so being led on to what she still called a petticoat (saying darkly that slips were not what respectable elderly widows had) and what she now rather dashingly called a brassière, having been lately weaned by her old friend Mrs. George Knox, wife of the well-known writer of historical biographies, from saying petticoat-bodice.