Sublime

ruth

She was Melissa’s oldest, boldest friend. They had gone to the same primary school. Hazel worked in advertising. She had a wide and glamorous smile behind which was an oft-foul tongue, and long, bouncing, half-French, half-Ghanaian curls falling down her back, the most beautiful, the most envied of their schoolgirl pack, the one the boys always wen

She felt sure that she would have accepted the judicious Hooker,5 if she had been born in time to save him from that wretched mistake he made in matrimony; or John Milton when his blindness had come on; or any of the other great men whose odd habits it would have been glorious piety to endure; but an amiable handsome baronet, who said ‘Exactly’ to

“And you,” Large Marge said. “What’s your story, missy?” “I don’t have a story.” “Everyone has a story. Maybe yours just starts up here.” “Maybe.”

Martin Jonas

one final choice:

Names ending in an “a,” often with a foreign derivation, had become popular in England; “Julia” and “Louisa,” which Jane Austen herself uses as character names, both first came into use there in the eighteenth century and were still not very common.