Teaser Tuesdays (Nov.8)

Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:

* Grab your current read
* Open to a random page
* Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
* BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
* Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!

 Henry James was drunk.
     The room in where he was dining looked familiar, but he could not place it.  There was an oak sideboard, elaborately carved, and a cupboard containing a collection of fine porcelains.  The plate was bone china, the silver heavy and apparently old.  There was a landscape (was it Corot?) near the door, a set of prints (Rowlandson?) on the side wall, and a portrait by someone of talent over the mantel.  It was a good house, though how good was a matter of whether the portrait was by van Dyck of an esteemed ancestor or by Sargent of a more contemporary personage  (he was too bleary-eyed to look), and whether the silver had been passed down or purchased secondhand.
                                    ~p. 1, What Alice Knew by Paula Marantz Cohen.