Emotion is extremely exhausting, and Emma makes very nice fish-cakes

She went on telling Miss Silver everything she knew. It gave her the most extraordinary sense of relief. When she had finished she felt weak, and empty, and quiet.

Miss Silver coughed in a very kind manner and said briskly, 'And now, my dear, we will have some breakfast. Emma will have it ready for us. Fish-cakes – and do you prefer tea or coffee?'

'Oh, Miss Silver, I couldn't!'

Miss Silver was putting the knitting away in a flowered chintz bag. She said with great firmness, 'Indeed you can, my dear. And you will feel a great deal better when you have had something to eat. Emotion is extremely exhausting, and Emma makes very nice fish-cakes. And perhaps you would like to wash your face.'

Ivory Dagger (1953)

Patricia Wentworth

Note: I love Miss Silver - the knitting, the cough*, the spinster saved from poverty by her own wits. This is quite a weak entry in the Miss Silver canon, mostly because the heroine-victim (not the young lady above) is all pale and spineless and totally without the spirit to rescue herself. 

* From the preface to Catherine Wheel: "To those readers who have so kindly concerned themselves about Miss Silver’s health. Her occasional slight cough is merely a means of self-expression. It does not indicate any bronchial affection. She enjoys excellent health. P.W."

she always felt cheerier at breakfast

'How can you eat that sawdust, Father?' she inquired, beginning on eggs and bacon and speaking cheerfully because it was a fine morning and only ten minutes past nine; and somehow, at the beginning of every new day, there was always a chance that this one might be different from all the rest. Something might happen; and then everything would be jollier all round.

Madge did not see clearly into her feelings; she only knew that she always felt cheerier at breakfast than at tea.

...

'What time did you say Viola's train gets in?' Tina asked her mother; she sometimes found the Wither silences unendurable.

'Half-past twelve, dear.'

'Just in nice time for lunch.'

'Yes.'

'You know perfectly well that Viola's train gets in at half-past twelve,' intoned Mr Wither slowly, raising his eyelids to look at Tina, 'so why ask your mother? You talk for the sake of talking, it's a silly habit.' He slowly looked down again at his little bowl of mushy cereal.

'I'd forgotten,' said Tina. She continued vivaciously, at the silence. 'Don't you loathe getting to a place before twelve o'clock, Madge – too late for breakfast and too early for lunch?'

Stella Gibbons

Nightingale Wood (1938)

Is not this marmalade Godlike?

"Something has happened," she thought. "Can Reggie have said anything already?"

She walked into the breakfast-room, where she found Lord Reggie alone.

He was holding up a table-spoon filled with marmalade to catch the light from a stray sunbeam that filtered in through the drawn blinds, and wore a rapt look, a "caught up" look, as Mrs. Windsor would have expressed it.

"Good morning," he said softly. "Is not this marmalade Godlike? This marvellous, clear, amber glow, amber with a touch of red in it, almost makes me believe in an after life. Surely, surely marmalade can never die!"

"I must have been mistaken," Mrs. Windsor thought, as she expressed her sense of the eternity of jams in general in suitable language.

Robert Hichens

The Green Carnation (1894)

I wrote about this satire on Oscar Wilde here.