“Flatteringly, like the dentist”

Sonie Marburg — who’s never, so far as we know, read Proust — drops into the Proustian “we.”

Jean Stafford, Boston Adventure (1944).

“Madam had been playing”: the harpsichord.

Also from this novel
A pallet on the floor : “The odors” : “Oh, piffle, you dumb-bells” : No Remington, Ticonderoga