The Earl of Woolsey was indeed completely nude. He did not seem particularly perturbed by this fact, but Miss Tarabotti felt the sudden need to close her eyes tight and think about asparagus or something equally mundane.
Oh, Sophronia, thank goodness. Save me? Please? All those young girls, in pastels, talking about the weather. I shall go jump off a bridge, I swear I shall. Do you have bridges in Wiltshire? They chatter, they chatter worse than Dimity ever did. Oh, the chattering! The chattering, it haunts me.
One could not blame a people for disliking vampires. Vampires were like brussels sprouts – not for everyone and impossible to improve upon with sauce.
He also seemed to speak predominantly in italics.
The tea, once it arrived, had its customary effect – engendering comfort and loosening the tongue. That’s tea for you, thought Sophronia, the great social lubricant.
If I don’t like it, I stop. Life’s too short to read a book that doesn’t entertain me.
Sophronia and Dimity took a vacant love seat at the front, Sophronia dislodging a large, fluffy cat with a scrunched-up face. The cat gave her a disgusted look. Or seemed to; it was hard to tell with that face.
What she said was “I want a man who stays out of my way.
A girl wearing a wicker chicken and playing the harp bopped me with a book about buns and then stuffed me under a piano.
The greatest unwritten law of the supernatural set was that one simply didn’t steal someone else’s human.
He wants to know why my marks aren’t better. Why I don’t speak fluent French. Why I can’t kill a fully grown man with a nutcracker.
If anyone saw Monique, a well-dressed woman of quality, dangling from the doorway, they apparently assumed everyone had difficulties in life and moved on.
Miss Alexia Tarabotti was not enjoying her evening. Private balls were never more than middling amusements for spinsters, and Miss Tarabotti was not the kind of spinster who could garner even that much pleasure from the event. To put the pudding in the puff: she had retreated to the library, her favorite sanctuary in any house, only to happen upon an unexpected vampire. She.
As Dimity said, “Sidheag surely does grumpy old man very well for a sixteen-year-old girl.
Petunia Temminnick’s coming-out ball was pronounced a resounding success by all in attendance. There had been highly intoxicating punch, a variety of dances, good music, and intermission entertainment. No one knew why the beautiful Miss Pelouse had stripped, rolled about in the garden, and then chucked a cheese pie at the youngest Temminnick girl before being taken away in floods of tears, but it was surely the highlight of a most enjoyable evening.
The sofa clattered back into motion and came after her but was confined to the shed. It stopped in the doorway, glaring at her and shaking threatening tassels – if an object without eyes can be said to glare. Sophronia felt sorry for the chaise longue, but she wasn’t going to risk being caught in order to mollify a gaudy piece of furniture.
Soap understood her. Soap would always understand.
Could that technique, she wondered, be legitimately referred to as a “parassault”?
As much as she was enjoying it, Dimity would always rather talk about reading than actually read.
He wielded verbal italics as if they were capable of actual bodily harm.