In this spirit, she had phoned and invited her neighbor over for drinks: "Bring your houseguest. Are you going to marry him?" She was old enough to say whatever she wanted to, although age had very little to do with it. She had usually said what she wanted to, from the age of eleven months on.

Men seldom objected to Lucy's frankness. She had been a beauty, and now, in her sixties, she still had the finely whittled bones, the flash and fire-- and sometimes the imperious ways-- of an indestructible belle. But not a Southern belle; Lucy was much too direct. Women were more put off by this then men. Grace Dillworth had shied away from the head-on frankness of "Are you going to marry him?" And she had gone on to commit the unforgivable (to Lucy) stupidity of refusing the invitation with top-of-the-tongue phrases like "take a rain check." One did N O T take a rain check for a command performance. Lucy, a solipsist, took a dim view of this."

-- from A Dying Fall (1973)