Cut-glass

There was a rough stone age and a smooth stone age and a bronze age, and many years afterward a cut-glass age. In the cut-glass age, when young ladies had persuaded young men with long, curly mustaches to marry them, they sat down several months afterward and wrote thank-you notes for all sorts of cut-glass presents—punch bowls, finger-bowls, dinner-glasses, […]

“Yes, I really was pinging,” she says, with that imperious cut-glass accent.

The princess had made occasional wartime radio broadcasts, her piping, stilted voice, speaking in cut-glass tones to the children of the empire, […]