“How much do I want to bet the young man will be a straightlaced knurd?” Isabel chimed as she thought about the prospective house guest she’ll be waiting on this summer. She used the derogatory term “knurd” she’d learned back in England from Lady Chatterly’s friends who attended the school of Eton. It was “drunk” spelled backward to refer to someone who was more interested in his studies and grades than partying and enjoying alcohol after classes.

The sheep for fodder follow the shepherd, the shepherd for food follows not the sheep.

Nick had heard her play through the very beginning of it a dozen times, until he was screaming at her in his head to go on. Well, now she did, watching her own hands busying up and down the keyboard as if they were astonishing automata that she had wound up and set in motion, in perfect synchrony, to produce this silvery flow of sound.

Clad in a Persian-Renaissance gown and a widow's tiara of white batiste, Mrs Thoroughfare, in all the ferment of a Marriage-Christening, left her chamber on vapoury autumn day and descending a few stairs, and climbing a few others, knocked a trifle brusquely at her son's wife's door.