As Lucy Ramsdale said when the news reached her, "If Grace's papa could hear this, he wouldn't just turn over in his grave-- he'd levitate."

Grace Dilworth's papa was buried under the largest marble edifice in Wingate's cemetary, but anybody who had tangled with Sam Dilworth wouldn't quite put it past him to crack through a marble tombstone and commandeer a passing hearse. He had been a very forcible man. And he had kept his daughter in loving thralldom from the time she'd teethed on his platinum cuff links. Grace had been thirty-nine when he died, and the betting was that, when she went off on a long cruise afterward, she was still, as Lucy put it, "untouched by human hands."

If Grace had come home from her trip with an ocelot or a two-foot pygmy, it wouldn't have caused much talk. The people of Wingate, Connecticut (population seven thousand, not counting masochistic summer commuters), took oddities in stride. But Grace Dilworth did not come home with an ocelot or a pygmy; she had brought home a six-foot man and was keeping him right on the premises. According to the best reckoning-- and Wingate ladies were very shrewd at this sort of higher mathematics-- he was at least six years younger than his hostess.

--from A Dying Fall (1973)

On the rare occasions when Mother had time to paint, her favorite accomplice was an indomitable old lady of over seventy, Mrs. Ramspeck. Mrs. Ramspeck had the only electric carriage left in town, one of those genteel, high-bodied affairs that should have moved at a snail's pace, but somehow the old lady managed to drive it in the spirit of a Stutz bear-cat, with a hey nonny nonny. Once when she was driving Mother to the outskirts of town, so that they might spend the afternoon painting a nice clump of pines, the electric stalled on the railroad tracks. According to the account we heard later, Mrs. Ramspeck was fiddling with the steering bar when Mother heard the screech of an oncoming train, and begged her friend to abandon the carriage. "Now don't be rattled, Kitty," Mrs. Ramspeck said briskly. "We'll just push it off the tracks."

They got out and pushed, while the train swung around a curve and started down the track straight at them. The electric refused to budge, and so did Mrs. Ramspeck. Just as Mother, in desperation, was about to knock the old lady over the head, in order to drag her unconscious form to safety, the electric gave an apologetic hiccough, yielded to their shoves and lurched off the tracks. With the hot breath of the engine on their backsides, Mother and Mrs. Ramspeck leaped for it as the train pounded by. Mother was so shaken that she told her friend she couldn't possibly paint that afternoon, but Mrs. Ramspeck gave a sturdy slap at the dust on her long black skirts and said, "Oh, fiddlesticks, Kitty. The light will be just right on those pines."

--from We Shook the Family Tree (1946)

When winter came to the already dank basement, I developed a cough as loud as Camille's, and it was this that finally proved my undoing, or my doing. The director and the calisthenics instructor decided I was run down; I was too thin and round-shouldered, and I didn't sit up straight. They knew I spent my mornings off writing, and they said that was bad for Posture. They very nicely agreed I could go on writing, but I'd have to do exercises to combat it. I could take part of my lunch hour, or come in early and use the gym. Several times they even got me into the billowing bloomers, but I weighed ninety pounds, and on me the bloomers came down like harem trousers, only thick serge, which is a fabric no sultan would stand for. In desperation, I enrolled in a one-night-a-week copywriting course at New York University, and the professor there got me a job in advertising. It was five dollars less a week than Anne Morgan paid, but the atmosphere was full of pipe tobacco, and I found that infinitely healthier than Physical Education without men.

-- from "Unmixed Company"

Two of her three listeners shuddered pleasurably. The third, Lucy Ramsdale, snorted. For a woman who looked as fragile and exquisite as Meissen china, Lucy had a very strong snort. "I told Jeanette Eckert if she sold to those ghouls she deserved to be their first customer and I'd dance at her funeral."

None of her fellow volunteers questioned this statement. Very few people in Wingate would have questioned it. Lucy had never been twiddle-tongued. She had been a beauty, and she still had the finely whittled bone structure-- and sometimes the imperious ways-- of a beauty. Recently she'd been involved in investigating several local murders, and unlike those sleuths who believe in keeping their mouths shut, she was still apt to speak her mind. The trait was, at times, the despair of her tenant, Inspector James McDougal, the retired head of homicide of the Connecticut State Police, who lived in the studio behind her house three miles outside Wingate. The studio had been her husband's; Hal Ramsdale had died several years before, and nobody since had been able-- or brave enough-- to curb Lucy's tongue.

"Where the hell's the dagger?" she said now.

-from Beauty Sleep (1977)

...Janet snorted with amusement, then twisted around to glance at the electric clock on her bedside table. It was a present from a grateful author of historical romances, and Janet regarded it ungratefully, remembering how muzzy the woman had been on dates and epochs-- once she'd sent Marie Antoinette to a ball with Charles the Second-- and whenever she was corrected, saying, "But the mood is so much more important, I always think." It was typical of her well-meaning muddleheadedness to have chosen an expensive modern clock of the no-hands variety. At that moment, it was either ten minutes after twelve or two o'clock, and Janet plumped wishfully for the latter because she was paid by the hour for copy-editing.

She looked at her wrist watch and saw that was no help--4:13-- having stopped at the hour of the night when people often die, or would like to. More than once she'd wanted to herself. She had had insomnia so badly she often read late and slept fitfully till nine or ten. Since giving up her regular job in the publishing firm two years before, to avoid seeing Alvin again, she had made herself punch a mental time clock every day, but in an out-of-kilter way, on a different shift, so that she wouldn't mesh with anyone's life but her own.

She had become so adept at shutting off her awareness of people that now that the odd noises had aroused her, she was as restless as someone who's been awakened suddenly, inexplicably, and can't get back to sleep. After deciding it was only 12:10 she wound her watch and thought crossly, How did it get to be so early? The sun feels more like July than October. The soil around the mums will be baked, and just when the buds are starting. A mirage of cracked, parched earth was so menacingly clear she jumped up from the desk just as another burst of noise overhead gave her an added excuse.

--from Open the Door (1966)