They're like people playing croquet in the 'sixties.

How long they've all been shut up in this ship I don't know--years and years I should say--but one feels as though one had boarded a little separate world, and they'd never been on shore, or done ordinary things in their lives.

It's what I've always said about literary people--they're far the hardest of any to get on with.

The worst of it is, these people--a man and his wife and a niece--might have been, one feels, just like everybody else, if they hadn't got swallowed up by Oxford or Cambridge or some such place, and been made cranks of.
The man's really delightful (if he'd cut his nails), and the woman has quite a fine face, only she dresses, of course, in a potato sack, and wears her hair like a Liberty shopgirl's.

They talk about art, and think us such poops for dressing in the evening.