“They’d had a long chat, Elsie Gormley and this house, more than sixty years of it. It had witnessed all her tempers, all her moods, and usually improved them. It held her voice, her husband’s, her children’s, and now their children’s in turn – echoes and repetitions lodged in around the baseboards, around the window frames like those pale motes of dust that had wedged at the edge of the kitchen floor.”
