Anglo-Saxon Attitudes

Ingeborg Middleton, coming downstairs to greet the village children,
said to herself, ' Oh God, let the carol-singing be a success and let the
family arrive in time to hear it and I shan’t mind if on Christmas Day
there are rows and difficulties. I honestly shan’t expect everything to go
right on Christmas Day, if I have what I want now,’ she added, as
though God might not believe her willingness to have only part of
her own way. She feared, perhaps, that God would know her own
temperament as well as she did. A more inner voice added, ‘Let
Robin and Johnnie, but especially johnnie, think that only I could
‘have madeisuch a little Christmas occasion.’ She was careful, how-
ever, not to listen too carefully to this second prayer lest its demand
for filial adoration might be too outrageous and so annoy God that
He would refuse her all her wishes. V
If, at fifty-nine, she had no strong personal experience of God, she
[still believed that if she accepted any disappointment she should be
recompensed for her self-denial. She had brought every power of her
personality to convince other people of this in childhood; and she still
did so. On. occasion, of course, she overreached herself, but on the
whole it had worked very well, except perhaps with her husband. In
return, as she often reflected, she gave people everything she pos-
sessed - warmth, liveliness, love, natural gaiety.

and
 Ingeborg put down her knife and fork and smiled atjohn and Kay.
Papa doesn’t change,’ she said, winking at them in special intimacy.
Even now he believes that he is tired when he is just hungry. Give
 father a large piece of goose,’ she said to Donald. ‘There,
erald, no one can have indigestion from my roast goose.’
 But if Gerald was to be forcibly fed, What would be the reaction of
 Marie Helene, about to receive the Sacrament? In her present mood,
Ingeborg would have no mercy towards hunger-strikers. Donald was
the first to think of this and was delighted, when his mother-in-law
ordered food to be kept back for the late-comers, to be able to say,
Not for Marie Helene surely. I imagine she’ll be going to Midnight
Mass.
 It was soon apparent that Mrs Middleton was going to insist on the
aine scene that she played each Christmas. ‘But, my dear Donald,
liy should you think she wishes to go to church with an empty
tummy?’ she laughed.
Donald was left by the others to argue the dogma of the Real Pre-
ence with her this year. After all, he had raised the subject.
'Very well,’ Ingeborg said at last. ‘If my daughter—in-law is this
 of cannibal.
and
"...impressed or impressing, everybody was superbly flat or dead; even when they had drunk a great deal of champagne and had begun to cut the air with that peculiar harsh sound of cultural voices raised in conversation competition, they never betrayed themselves into saying anything that could possibly mar the tedious triviality with which they clothed serious subjects or the deadly heaviness with which they discussed the trivial.
and
 As Mrs. Middleton's mood of distrust melted back into her usual flow of whimsy, her children's rally to placate her dissolved and their natural antipathies came to the surface again.
and

"Do you?" Clarissa asked. "In a sense of course, you're right". She was unwilling to entirely relinquish her improvised opinion.