Sublime

(Although even in her twenties, Charlie wasn’t what you’d call eye candy: her looks had always been sharp edged and intense, more like eye tequila.)

She was 29, “as old as you got then without being married,” she said, “before people saw you as somehow defective.”

Her

"Woman" in the abstract is young, and, we assume, charming. As they get older they pass off the stage, somehow, into private ownership mostly, or out of it altogether. But these good ladies were very much on the stage, and yet any one of them might have been a grandmother.

For five or ten years they worked together, growing stronger and wiser and more and more mutually attached, and then the miracle happened—one of these young women bore a child.

And there, as years passed, this wonder-woman bore child after child, five of them—all girls.

“I want [my daughter] to grow up in a society where she will have a comfortable and important place.”

"Mother of Mike, boys—what Gorgeous Girls! To climb like that! to run like that! and afraid of nothing. This country suits me all right. Let's get ahead."