A big old wrought-iron grating from the front of a house.

Two Austrian dead lay in the rubble in the shade of the house.

It was a matter of chance that I should have rented a house in one of the strangest communities in North America.

The pink wall of the house opposite had fallen out from the roof, and an iron bedstead hung twisted toward the street.

The windows were ajar and gleaming white against the fresh grass outside that seemed to grow a little way into the house.

Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay.

We walked through a high hallway into a bright rosy-coloured space, fragilely bound into the house by French windows at either end.

They were both in white, and their dresses were rippling and fluttering as if they had just been blown back in after a short flight around the house.

My house was at the very tip of the egg, only fifty yards from the Sound, and squeezed between two huge places that rented for twelve or fifteen thousand a season.

He found the house, a weather-beaten cardboard bungalow at eighty a month, but at the last minute the firm ordered him to Washington, and I went out to the country alone.

One day she found that she liked it the way the hair was black on his arms and how white they were above the tanned line when he washed up in the washbasin outside the house.

There was the general store and postoffice with a high false front and maybe a wagon hitched out in front, Smith’s house, Stroud’s house, Fox’s house, Horton’s house and Van Hoosen’s house.

My own house was an eyesore, but it was a small eyesore, and it had been overlooked, so I had a view of the water, a partial view of my neighbour’s lawn, and the consoling proximity of millionaires⁠—all for eighty dollars a month.

The lawn started at the beach and ran towards the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens⁠—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run.

The practical thing was to find rooms in the city, but it was a warm season, and I had just left a country of wide lawns and friendly trees, so when a young man at the office suggested that we take a house together in a commuting town, it sounded like a great idea.