“My client is feeling very insecure this week,” Stebbins said, swinging his feet up onto the leather couch, leaning his head back against the paper antimacassar, and lighting up a large cigar.

The Reception Committee shuffled on the platform while Filyuchev, the Delegation bureaucrat, was still a step up on the train holding Metved’s flowers which, hurriedly culled, showed serrated edges of dandelion. 

Ten miles south of Norfolk, Vonnie took the Tourguide map from the Rambler glove compartment and spread it out across her knees. Plotting rough co-ordinates on a Portsmouth Nags Head axis, she ignored the printed mileage chart and gauged the distance south with a makeshift caliper of thumb and index finger.

It is morning, about ten o'clock. An hour ago I slipped and fell against the dull rim of the bathtub and broke what must be my right clavicle. 

I can hear him, in the next room but one, typing away. An answer to Pamela’s Special Delivery letter perhaps? Or lists of moneymaking projects. Possibly even a story, or a revised out line forPopcorn, in which he will refute the errors of our age.

This is a street that tries our credulity. A caterpillar truck has just overturned, arching its middle into the air. The neighbors appear. The driver wriggles out unhurt. 

Stella wrote that she would take the train to Providence, and he should meet her there in the car. Already he was calculating how he should proceed. A false step would alarm her and throw her off, and he had too much to lose, with all the entanglements of family friend and trust.

His (running across the beach he stubbed his toe on the pail of broken shells half imbedded in the wet gray sand) sister (young Chinese girl fresh to America, already a woman not yet a man suffered from sex guilt ((thought mother father were watching her from heaven)), consequently found men repugnant, wore trousers) was blowing on a conch shell.

The flags of the boats in the bay whipped in the wind and the gulls wheeled for snapshots and the sound of bicycle bells fell through the leaves of the chestnut trees and down the cobbled streets, and, on warm afternoons, on the porch of her summer home, Mrs. Harlan Case would often be heard to say, “I would have sown them like beautiful flowers,” for she had wanted many children.