Caro said, "I withhold my analysis of your own attitude."

Leadbetter's unlaced fingers came down on the blotter with a synchronized slap. "Miss Bell, do you really not find this incident utterly grotesque?"

"I know that any adherence to a principle can be called grotesque, and even made to appear so. At least for a time."

"You call it a principle. A tempest in a teacup."

"Mr. Bostock said, in a teapot."

He was now at white heat: molten Leadbetter. (To his wife that evening he would say, "I don't even mind insults, but will not tolerate verbal abuse.") "Miss Bell, since you yourself find our ways so unsatisfactory, perhaps you should seriously consider returning to--ah--New Zealand."

In a long pause he was made to feel her superior strength, and the fact that she had been withholding it for years out of charity.