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)