All was strange in a fog, buildings grew vague, human beings groped and became lost, the landmarks, the compass points, by which they navigated melted into nothingness and the world was transfigured into a country of the blind. But if the sighted became blind, then the blind – and for some odd reason I have always regarded myself as one of the blind – the blind became sighted, and I remember felling at home in the fog, happily at ease in the murk and gloom that so confused my neighbors.

Nothing improper was occurring, on the surface, but she hadn’t said a word about her new friend to Max; and by consistently failing to mention and event of significance in her day she was practising a form of duplicity.

This is the nature of people, they unerringly select as their victim the one who most needs their warmth.

So let there be no more of this clucking and wheedling. Oh, Pa, are you sure? Or: Oh, Francis, is this really a good idea? Let me be clear. I am always sure, and it is always a good idea.

As we shook hands I wondered idly what her urine looked like.

We coexisted in a state of mutual detachment.

Dear God but I despair of these women who abandon their filters in age and just say whatever comes into their heads.

For oh dear, it is a spartan business, this growing old, this cleaving to life, because it demands that you jettison so much that once had been the very zest and pith of life, and why? So that life, pithless, and sans zest, may continue, and the flesh, oh, the flesh, the sins of the flesh - they are as motes in a fading sunbeam. And how I do miss them.

Various pieces of huge dark furniture constricted the passage, and the place smelled of boiled fish. I was shown into the parlor, where the gloom of that overcast day was filtered through windows curtained in dingy lace.

How has it come to this? Where once my life was populated with the living, now I seem to keep company only with ghosts and ghouls and the like.