Call it macaroni

I flew through Elizabeth Bowen’s wonderful novel The House in Paris so fast that I had no time to note it here. Instead, I dove into another Bowen, her first novel, The Hotel. From there, I give you this gem of biting British comedy. Poor Miss Pym has had a fight with her friend and she enters the dining room of the hotel with a tear-stained face, too late for luncheon:

Miss Pym looked diffidently at the waiter. She had cut herself off from the omelette, so he shrugged his shoulders and brought her up a plate of macaroni from the servants’ lunch. This the bruised creature pitifully but with evidence of hunger bagan to eat; the traditional British struggle with macaroni brought her down sharply from tragedy to farce.