[I]t was her [Princess Charlotte of Prussia's] increasingly violent tantrums that caused her parents the greatest concern. Shortly before the child's second birthday we read, 'Ditta has such outbreaks of rage & stubbornness that she screams blue murder.'

Why did the preppie boy make a great social worker? He had a lot of practice shaking hands with the unemployed.

Being of independent and even of abundant means, the Clarendons had for many years stuck to their old Manhattan mansion in East Nineteenth Street, whose ghosts must have looked sorely askance at the bizarrerie of Surama and the Thibetans.

Luis smiled nonunderstandingly and shook his head. “The English language is odd,” he observed.