A prettiness mummified by years of chalk dust.

In the middle of the silence in a writer’s house lies an invalid: the book being worked on.

A kind of duet-she as oboe, he as contrabassoon, and full of obbligato digressions.

[He] is a tall, grandly built man; [she] tall and delicate. Both are narrow-faced with long, imperial noses; as they pose for pictures, it is a turkey buzzard sharing companionably with an egret.