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)