Every time she took a prominent part in this way in keeping the peace, melancholy Miss Meadowcroft looked slowly round at her in stern and silent disparagement of her interference.

A more dreary and more disunited family party I never sat at the table with.

Envy, hatred, malice and uncharitableness are never so essentially detestable to my mind as when they are animated by a sense of propriety, and work under the surface.
But for my interest in Naomi, and my other interest in the little love-looks which I now and then surprised passing between her and Ambrose, I should never have sat through that supper.

I should certainly have taken refuge in my French novel and my own room.
At last the unendurably long meal, served with ostentatious profusion, was at an end.

Miss Meadowcroft rose with her ghostly solemnity, and granted me my dismissal in these words: "We are early people at the farm, Mr.Lefrank.I wish you good-night." She laid her bony hands on the back of Mr.Meadowcroft's invalid-chair, cut him short in his farewell salutation to me, and wheeled him out to his bed as if she were wheeling him out to his grave.
"Do you go to your room immediately, sir?
If not, may I offer you a cigar--provided the young gentlemen will permit it ?" So, picking his words with painful deliberation, and pointing his reference to "the young gentlemen" with one sardonic side-look at them, Mr.John Jago performed the duties of hospitality on his side.