Great Granny Webster's tiny pats of margarine, when they were carried in by Richards laid out on a large silver engraved butter-dish, looked so diminished by their expensive setting as to appear almost completely non-existent. The saccharine she always served instead of sugar looked equally shamed and reduced by the immensely valuable bowl that held it, and the same diminishment would befall her stingy and minute portions of rubbery, unseasoned canned spaghetti which only seemed to speck the huge gleaming surface of the banquet platter on which it would appear - looking much less like food than some unfortunate little accident that flawed the beauty of her silver, a tiny whitish excrescence that Richards should have cleaned.

When one was with her, she could almost persuade one that there was something cowardly and despicable in any emotional dodging, in any refusal to experience every single blow that life could deal one, head-on. She could make one feel that there was an almost superhuman courage in the way she was not frighted to admit that the only things she now hoped for from life was a continued consciousness, unpleasant as she well knew that it had to be.

When Great Granny Webster used the word "nowadays," she always stressed and separated each syllable and managed to make it sound like some lethal poison which was responsible for destroying everything in the universe that she had once found a little good.

She often seemed to be trying to use her hard chair as camouflage, as if she hoped that Death might enter her drawing-room and leave again, tricked by her tactics - that he would think he had already taken her, she showed so much less sign of life than her wooden chair.

The stories Aunt Lavinia told tended to be extremely vivid and somewhat surrealist, and she like to tell them with great emphasis and well-planned timing. It was the zest and joy with which she told them that gave them their validity, and she made it hardly matter whether all the details were strictly true.