Pipistrello's Commonplace Book

Like all weddings it had left the strange feeling of futility, the slight sense of depression that comes to English people who have tried, from their strong sense of tradition, to be festive and sentimental and in high spirits too early in the day. The frame of mind supposed to be appropriate to an afternoon wedding can only be genuinely experienced by an Englishman at two o'clock in the morning. Hence the dreary failure of these exhibitions. Ada Leverson, Love's Shadow, 1908

Who can begin conventional amiability the first thing in the morning? It is the hour of the savage instincts and natural tendencies; it is the triumph of the Disagreeable and the Cross. I am convinced that the Muses and the Graces never thought of having breakfast anywhere but in bed. Elizabeth von Arnim, Elizabeth and her German Garden, 1898