Sublime

That Thomas had worked for the Chronicle since 1976 was easily established, as was the fact that he’d published three brief novels since that date. Out of a sense of delicacy Carleton never mentioned that he owned all three of these, and found them elegant and elliptical, couched in prose that had the cadence of the King James Bible, and concerned

tautology,

bloviating

actuarial tables.

On her fourteenth birthday, he gives her a bowdlerized translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis.