Sublime

She was on Fifth Avenue whenever she wanted to be, and she it was who rolled up, silky or furry, in the taxi, was assisted out, and stood, her next step nebulous, before the theaters of the thousand lights, before velvet-lined impossible shops; she it was. New York, for Maud Martha, was a symbol. Her idea of it stood for what she felt life ought to

“Does anyone want sherbet?” Lily asks, clearly picking up on the weirdness. “Mother,” Penny says darkly, “must you torture me?”

From the very start, Jacaranda was the big one with the large head who, till she was three, had to be swathed in pink for people not to say, “My, what a nice healthy boy you’ve got there . . .” April was a girl, a girlish girl with curly brown curls and a rosy-cheeked smile, delicate bone structure, and a small head. Neither Jacaranda nor April loo

10 first beau He had a way of putting his hands on a Woman. Light, but perforating. Passing by, he would touch the Woman’s hair, he would give the Woman’s hair a careless, and yet deliberate, caress, working down from the top to the ends, then gliding to the chin, then lifting the chin till the poor female’s eyes were forced to meet his, then proce

Annie Allen had won Brooks the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1950.

"Charlotte Backson, who first was called Comtesse de la Fere, and afterwards Milady de Winter, Baroness of Sheffield."

Cincinnati-born Theodosia Burr Goodman, whose father was a Jewish tailor from Poland, became Theda Bara (an acronym of “Death Arab”).

A wide gap between her front teeth gave an impish mischief to her smile, while the superb hook of her beaked nose endowed her serious expressions with an imposing authority.