Nor did he bother to get out much. - Richard Yates

I've also discovered at long last what you knew from the beginning—that my "broods" do not stem from any dark, Hamlet-like neurosis, incurable and tragic, but from plain laziness . . . I've pulled myself out of [several really major broods since you left] by the more painful but no less effective method of telling myself to shut up and get back to the typewriter. I'm not saying I've overcome them—I had a bad one just the other day—but I'm holding my own against the bastards. They don't immobilize me any more, and I'm confident it won't be long before I'll be able to brush them off like flies. Yates appears here as an almost perfect character out of his own imagination—one of those deterministic victims who "rush around trying to do their best . . . doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are."

The question of whether or not she would find it awkward being called "Mrs Nelson" remained unresolved; nobody in Scarsdale called her anything at all. Electric trains drew the men away to the city each morning and the children were swallowed up by the school. The women, alone in their big, impeccable houses, let their days slip away in endless rounds of triviality - or at least, that was the way Alice saw them in her mind's eye. She pictured them idling through easy household chores or giving instructions to their maids, and painting their fingernails and fixing their hair and compounding their lassitude by spending hours on the telephone with one another, talking of bridge clubs and luncheons and functions of the P.T.A. If their lives included anything more interesting than that she didn't learn of it, for none of them ever called her up or dropped in for a neighbourly visit - nor, apparently, did any of their husbands ever strike up an acquaintance with Sterling on the train. Scarsdale behaved as though Alice and Sterling didn't exist.

(and when would she ever learn not to monopolize a whole evening's conversation?)