Rosamond Lehmann took the title of her novel Dusty Answer (1927) from George Meredith's "Modern Love." This quotation serves as the book's epigraph:
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Ah, what a dusty answer gets the soul
When hot for certainties in this our life!
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Hypothesis: a good epigraph makes you want to read not only the book it prefaces but also the work from which it is taken. — DL