Paying Guests (Summarized Edition)

Paying Guests distills E. F. Benson's comedy of manners into a provincial boarding house where transient residents—retired officers, widows of slender means, aspirant bohemians—wage delicate campaigns of precedence across dining room and promenade. Minor slights swell into crises; thrift masquerades as taste; gossip circulates as currency. In quick, exact prose and deft free indirect style, Benson...