Then Evie was clopping toward her on her ridiculous high heels. The only thing I could hear distinctly was the word bitch! uttered by each in regard to the other. Then Evie was rummaging in her purse. I opened the window to hear what was being said.
 “I’ll give you money. Anything you want,” Evie was gasping.
 “First it was Lennie. Now you want to steal my brother. Bitch!” and Rosely took a godalmighty swing at her that missed by about three feet.
 “Look, I’ve got jewellery here. You can have all of it.”
    She had a cluster of sparkly things in her hand, outstretched. Rosely dashed them from her grasp and the glittering baubles scattered across the lawn. Then Rosely ran like the wind—she was always a fast runner—and was disappeared from the street while Evie crawled about on the lawn like a gaudy wombat, picking up her treasures.

In those days, I assiduously searched books for dirty bits, or violent bits—a habit that I did not escape until I was in my mid-twenties and finally discovered that actual sex was way beyond the abilities of even the greatest writer to describe it—though thankfully they never gave up trying. Almost always, sex scenes in books are derived of passion but that is its weakest form—it is the monumental humour, absurdity, awkwardness and foolishness of sex that eludes them mostly, as most bawdy comedy admits, but somehow that just takes too much away from heroes and heroines.
    Having found no sex scenes in the Brontes, I took to Samuel Butler whose The Way of All Flesh seemed sure to seethe with eroticism. Imagine my disappointment. The author was dead by the time the book was published. It was probably the morbid process of writing it that killed him, from sheer depression I assume. It is the saddest book ever written. The poor man fails his family through no fault of his own, spends years wandering trying to live down a minor disgrace for which everyone else has long since forgiven him for as they search for him. Finally, he returns, but they have given up, wife has assumed him dead and married again, he looks longingly through the window at the loving family scene that ought to have been his, and then wanders away… It’s the sort of book that makes you think seriously of suicide when you read it—for sure no one could have survived having written it.