Activity

“My brother and me used to pull the bells every Sunday at home,” Murphy said. “When we was kids, I mean. Used to get half a dollar apiece for it. Son of a bitch, if that don’t sound just the same.”

Listening, they sat smiling shyly at each other. Church bells on misty mornings were things you fo…

“… And then today,” he said, “today everything on the set had to stop dead—cameras, sound, everything—while he took me off in a corner and sat me down to discuss what he called Dramatic Theory, and he asked me if I was familiar with the work of a playwright named George Bernard Shaw. You think anyb…

“Oh, I don’t know,” Jill said in a light, teasing voice. “Maybe; maybe not. But don’t you think it’s a delightfully wicked idea?”

“I think you’re out of your mind,” Sally told her.

“Oh, I think so too,” she said with an attractive little wrinkling of her nose. “I think Cliff is too. Isn’t tha…

On Monday morning, sore-eyed and jittery from lack of sleep as he drove her back to Edgar Todd’s office, he began to be afraid they would never have such a good time again. All future days and nights might wither under the strain of trying to recapture this first weekend. They would discover unplea…

Above the fireplace, in a space plainly meant for some heavy old portrait or landscape, there hung instead a small painting on black velvet, in harshly bright colors, showing the face of a circus clown with a melancholy expression; the artist’s signature, so prominently written in white that it mig…