The baths were mostly tiled showers, with an endless variety of spouting mechanisms, but with one definitely non-Laodicean characteristic in common, a propensity, while in use, to turn instantly beastly hot or blindingly cold upon you, depending on whether your neighbor turned on his cold or his hot to deprive you of a necessary complement in the shower you had so carefully blended.

Helen interrupted her sister, by asking her opinion of the how the name, Gerald Vernon, sounded. Oh, charmingly! said Charlotte, and, raising herself above her sister, and reclining her splendid head upon her arm, continued she, Why, do you know such a one? I do, said Helen, It's a pretty name, that's all, and she tried to draw her sister's attention off, […]

Vp thou tame River, wake; / And from the liquid limbes this ſlumber ſhake: / Thou drownſ't thy ſelfe in inofficious ſleepe; / And theſe thy ſluggish waters ſeeme to creepe, / Rather than flow.

Their mother would walk out into the yard and cut a switch from a tree and beat him—beat him, it seemed to Florence, until any other boy would have fallen down dead; […]