Sublime

They ate sweets, took compacts out of their purses, ingenious new lighters. Margherita had the same expression on her face as when, in class, she managed to pass from one desk to the next a caricature of the nun teaching. If her husband had unexpectedly come in, she would have blushed as she had the day the nun discovered her and sent her out of th

‘I will write to him, then. But my cousins are bores.’ It seemed magnificent to Rosamond to be able to speak so slightingly of a baronet’s family, and she felt much contentment in the prospect of being able to estimate them contemptuously on her own account.

‘A lot of men sleep around,’ Xiu said. ‘A lot of men who aren’t married to Michelle Cutler. She’s almost certainly got “hitman” in her phone book somewhere. Right between “hairdresser” and “homeopath”.’ ‘I’m not convinced.’ ‘You’re probably right,’ Miller said. ‘I doubt she has a homeopath.’

‘You mean that he appears silly.’ ‘No, no,’ said Dorothea, recollecting herself, and laying her hand on her sister’s a moment, ‘but he does not talk equally well on all subjects.’ ‘I should think none but disagreeable people do,’ said Celia, in her usual purring way. ‘They must be very dreadful to live with. Only think! at breakfast, and always.’ D

Lisa del Giocondo, who was born in 1479 into a minor branch of the distinguished Gherardini family, whose roots as landowners stretched from feudal times but whose money had not survived quite so long. At fifteen, she married into the wealthy but not quite so prominent Giocondo family, which had made its riches in the silk trade. Her father had to

“You that farm boy always hangin around Desiree.”

The most astonishing thing about these books was that Dick and Jane and Baby Sally lived in a house with nothing around it but a white wooden fence, so flimsy and low that anyone at all could climb over it. There were no Angels, there were no Guardians. Dick and Jane and Baby Sally played outside in full view of everyone. Baby Sally could have been

whir, diffusing the scent of citrus and strawberries through the musty, subterranean air, just as Sam had first called her name. “Sadie

Jeff was a tender soul. I think he thought that country—if there was one—was just blossoming with roses and babies and canaries and tidies, and all that sort of thing.