slipping off a piece of toast

Her Serene Highness made one of her characteristic exits, which Lady Caroline declared always reminded her of a scrambled egg slipping off a piece of toast.

'Saki' (H. H. Munro)

The Unbearable Bassington (1912)

I can't believe I've never reviewed any Saki. 
Wonderful short stories ('Tobermory', the talking cat!) 
and this rather odd novel (also here). 
See reviews by desperate reader, stuck in a book, 
& i prefer reading.

Poor Saki.

Really wikipedia does not do him justice...

small cress sandwiches

In her brother Henry, who sat eating small cress sandwiches as solemnly as though they had been ordained in some immemorial Book of Observances, fate had been undisguisedly kind to her. He might so easily have married some pretty helpless little woman, and lived at Notting Hill Gate, and been the father of a long string of pale, clever useless children, who would have had birthdays and the sort of illnesses that one is expected to send grapes to, and who would have painted fatuous objects in a South Kensington manner as Christmas offerings to an aunt whose cubic space for lumber was limited. Instead of committing these unbrotherly actions, which are so frequent in family life that they might almost be called brotherly, Henry had married a woman who had both money and a sense of repose, and their one child had the brilliant virtue of never saying anything which even its parents could consider worth repeating. Then he had gone into Parliament, possibly with the idea of making his home life seem less dull; at any rate it redeemed his career from insignificance, for no man whose death can produce the item "another by-election" on the news posters can be wholly a nonentity.

Saki [H. H. Munro]

The Unbearable Bassington (1912)