Sublime

Viola imposed upon her lover but a short probation. They were married, as was becoming, with great privacy, – almost with secrecy, – in the hope perhaps, as was waggishly remarked at the time, that the late Mrs Lloyd wouldn’t hear of it.

It was a risk to mention the Royal Shakespeare Company, and RADA, but the Discreet Mourners woman failed to link Astrid Miller, Audrey Hepburn’s Friend One, with the Astrid Fellowes who had been at the centre of a scandal in the 1970s and had gone mad on stage at the National, midway through a matinee of Macbeth.

some small plump brownish person of firm but quiet carriage, who looks about her, but does not suppose that anybody is looking at her. If she has a broad face and square brow, well-marked eyebrows and curly dark hair, a certain expression of amusement in her glance which her mouth keeps the secret of, and for the rest features entirely insignifican

it so happened that ‘a gentleman of honourable parentage’ had a daughter with just the right qualifications, she being ‘of excellent parts for musicke, her needle, and good discourse, also very beautiful and personable’.

She was cast as the understudy to the star, Laura Bell Bundy, in the off-Broadway musical Ruthless!

Phoebe gave her a slight, reassuring smile. “I like you, Pandora. Nothing will change that.” Some of Pandora’s anguished shame faded, and she took a deep breath. “Thank you.”

sybarite.

Phoebe was mortified by her inability to speak. Her heartbeat was stampeding out of control. “Mama isn’t used to talking to grown-ups,” Justin said. “She likes children better.” “I’m very childlike,” the man said promptly. “Ask anyone around here.”

“Griselda Gowdie,” Grissel replied. “My mam is Janet Gowdie, the banshee of Auldearn, and my granny Isobel was pricked, hanged, and burned while she still lived, many years ago in Nairn.”