“Eustace has a girlfriend,” Alberta announced with all the joy and pride of a mother alligator watching its young scamper off to eat or be eaten (or drowned or run over) — which is to say, very little, for Alberta believed a good mother should be Detached, not Doting — and anyway you look at it, thought Eustace, she was mostly wrong.

“I heard him talking about...” Alberta lowered her voice, “hips” and Eustace smothered a snort of laughter, because Alberta would probably disapprove of his interest in dinosaurian anatomy even more than an interest in, er, female anatomy.

In any case, Harold merely grunted and hunched into his newspaper and muttered something about starting at the wrong end, and Eustace wished Pole could be there to see the look on Alberta’s face.