Lace trimmings

"What does he care about Miss Faith Cartwright and her endless and infernal needlework? Every letter his mother sends him contains news of yet more knitting, stitching and tedious crocheting. The Cartwright household must by this time be covered all over - every table, chair, lamp and piano - with acres of tassel and fringe, a woolwork flower heavily abloom in every nook of it. Does his mother really believe that he can be charmed by such a vision of himself - married to Faith Cartwright and imprisoned in an armchair by the fire, frozen in a kind of paralysed stupor, with his dear wife winding him up gradually in coloured silk threads like a cocoon, or like a fly snarled in the web of a spider?"

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace, Virago, London 1997, p.340