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)

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)

The little fan whirring in the back room of the Thrift Shop was no more adequate for ventilation than a scrawny bird flapping its wings. The only thing it riffled was the sales chart thumbtacked on the wall directly above the fan and kept up to date by the volunteer who had a firmer grasp of arithmetic than any of the other ladies. She had filled in neatly, with black marking pencil, the weekly and monthly figures on the secondhand merchandise sold for charity; the totals for April, may, June and July had shot up so violently it looked as if the ladies had robbed a bank and added their loot to the take.

--Beauty Sleep (1977)