They Were Sisters is a superb but sometimes difficult read because of the brilliantly drawn character of Geoffrey. Dorothy Whipple's choice of domestic detail is masterful, and reveals all we need to know about him. "It was a man’s house". Charlotte, his wife, "had given in to Geoffrey in everything, even the furnishing of the house". "There was something hotel-like in Geoffrey’s taste" and the living room resembles a "bar-parlour with drinks perpetually on the sideboard, quantities of brass, jokes on the poker-work and pottery tobacco-jars, pipe-racks, spill-holders, ash-trays and calendars, jokes of the irate, purple-faced colonel and comic curate variety". (This is a still from the 1945 film with James Mason as a suitably menacing Geoffrey.)