The rest, about half a million Russian Orthodox and about the same number of Protestants, were known as ‘dissidents’; the huge Jewish community defied classification.

She had a lot of empathy for her neighbor; she knew what it was like to lose a parent too.

[…]and Frank was already quite ashamed of his suspicions, and beginning to discard them as entirely unfounded, when again the door was thrown open, and, accompanied by her husband—overdressed, be-flounced, be-ringletted, and panting from the recent labours of the toilet—the real fugitive made her appearance in the portly person of Gertrude’s stepmother, the second Mrs Blake.

It is Christly hot. She wipes her forehead with the back of her hand.