summerwater

"He grunts and looks out the window. She thinks he's not really all that interested in that book, which looks to be another five-hundred-page lump by another—what's the word—preposterous, propensity, no, the other one, wealthy, well off, ha, prosperous, that's it, another prosperous and preposterous Englishman about how the world is ending because no one is doing what the writer thinks they ought to do, learning obsolete words for insects or scrubbing floors on their hands and knees with wooden brushes or exposing babies to germs, usually something the writer imagines that women or the lower orders did before he was born. She doesn't know why David goes on buying them."

~~ from Summerwater by Sarah Moss