There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea.

There are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour dedicated to the ceremony known as afternoon tea

The tea ceremony requires years of training and practice ... yet the whole of this art, as to its detail, signifies no more than the making and serving of a cup of tea. The supremely important matter is that the act be performed in the most perfect, most polite, most graceful, most charming manner possible.

Afternoon tea needn’t stand on ceremony. Anything that becomes more important than sweet fellowship, whether lace or linen or the china itself, is pretense. How much more we enjoy life when the pretenses are discarded!

She ordered a cup of tea, which proved excessively bad, and this gave her a sense that she was suffering in a romantic cause.

The Baroness found it amusing to go to tea; she dressed as if for dinner. The tea-table offered an anomalous and picturesque repast; and on leaving it they all sat and talked in the large piazza, or wandered about the garden in the starlight.