Ferguson could never let go of his mother, his unsmothering mother whose love was the source of all life for him, and merely to see her frown at him with that sad look in her eyes was a devastation, a bullet in the heart.

For those who have never navigated “Fairways,” as some longbeards call the original store — there are satellites in Harlem and Brooklyn and on Long Island, with another planned for New Jersey — it is a low-ceilinged warren under pitiless fluorescents.

. . . reap a pleasure from what, to the generality of mankind, may seem burdensome and laborious.

Miss Bremer talked plentifully in her strange manner—good English enough for a foreigner, but so oddly intonated and accented, that it is impossible to be sure of more than one word in ten.