It was the best of times it was the worst of times.
My name is Frank Bascombe.
Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at that critical moment it presumes itself as reality.
The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel.
The street was darkened by a smoky sunset, and light had not yet come on in the lamps near the empty house.
Lately I have come to feel that the pigeons are spying on me.
The evening before my departure for Blithedale, I was returning to my bachelor-apartments, after attending the wonderful exhibition of the Veiled Lady, when an elderly-man of rather shabby appearance met me in an obscure part of the street.
By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation.
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of Princeton.
At least once during the cyclone season, Anne Wendel and her four girls raced through the pouring yellow rain to the cellar.