Imagining Emma Bovary in bed: “[She’d be] rather stunned and frantic, I would think. And I don't say it to be comic. I suspect stunned and frantic, breathless and shockingly cold to the touch.”

My father’s last aunt moved in with us when I was ten and she was a thousand. Eighty-three, to be truthful, and virgin pure but sadly broke down. She’d lived near us, in her family home, all her life and

Fifteen or twenty more dollars a night,
They could enact this solemn start
On the Grand Canal, if just in a garret