I was looking around dreamily. "I worked here twenty-five years ago. In the basement."

"You worked in the basement!" Edward exclaimed. "What did you do-- shovel coal?"

"I was the receptionist. All I had to do was look cordial."

He said it was the first time he'd ever heard of a receptionist being kept in the basement, and he even looked more skeptical when I explained it was Anne Morgan's idea. "You mean J.P.Morgan's sister?"

That was who I meant all right. She was noted for her philanthropies, and as a fighter for women's rights, and I guess she lumped the two together when she founded the New York Working Women's Association and built a combination hotel-clubhouse for members, most of them single women in business. Officially, it was called the W.W.A., but many of the people who worked there referred to it simply as Anne Morgan's Club.

She was a great believer in keeping fit, which is how I happened to be in the basement, sneezing and smiling. The entire Physical Education Department was down there: swimming pool, gymnasium, and locker rooms with billowing serge gym bloomers and grey tank suits as shapeless as ectoplasm. Anne Morgan used the pool sometimes, but more often she just brought visitors down to show them how we were teeming with healthy physical exercise. She was a tall, wide-striding, briskly good-humored woman in hand-knit suits that must have been blocked on a barber pole. she wore her white hair neatly chopped, and when she spoke, at least to minor employees like myself, it was like a cannon firing a friendly salute, boom, boom, boom. In a basement, a cannon sounds louder and longer.

-from "Unmixed Company"

Every Sunday morning, Culbertson McClintock and the strong, agile Johnny would finish up the farm chores early. Then they all piled into the lumber wagon, with a picnic lunch, and went off to spend the day at the little Seceders' church-- a meeting house-- deep in the woods. The Seceders were old style Presbyterians, and their services resembled the early settlers' "meetings." farmers hitched their horses to trees around the grove, and the children played quietly while the grownups gossiped. Boys, their hair slicked down with marrow grease, eyed demure young girls in linsey-woolsey. Sunday School was from ten to eleven; for the next two hours, Elder Slentz hollered and pounded on the pulpit in the tiny church, in a sermon reeking of brimstone for sinners. Johnny, raised in the strict, devout McClintock household, had learned his Catechism, the first four Gospels, and most of the Acts, almost before he could spell. But the long Sunday sessions were hard on even the most docile children, and Johnny, an exuberant normal boy,  got a warning pinch from his aunt whenever he fidgeted.

The picnic bench was a blessed escape, but all too brief. Afterwards, men, women and children went back inside for another hour, or sometimes two, of the Elder's damning the Devil, and offering the Kingdom of Heaven like a bribe for model deportment. Prayers were a droning filibuster to keep Satan at bay. To please his aunt, Johnny, who could carry a tune as well as a tree toad, even sang in the choir.

--from The Great Oildorado (1959)