She didn't even finish her last sentence; it just trailed off. I think the subject had changed in her head while her mouth had continued on the old t… - Steve Martin

Mirabelle replaces the absent friends with books and television mysteries of the PBS kind. The books are mostly nineteenth-century novels in which women are poisoned or are doing the poisoning. She does not read these books as a romantic lonely hearts turning pages in the isolation of her room, not at all. She is instead an educated spirit with a sense of irony. She loves the gloom of these period novels, especially as kitsch, but beneath it all she finds that a part of her indentifies with all that darkness.

…when the person beside you is making you alert and keen and the idea of being with anyone else is not imaginable…

career in the irrational world of creativity not only made sense but had moral purpose.