“She made her characters, held them, to the letter of the law. If one of Gertrude’s heroines, running to snatch from the lips of her little daughter a half-emptied bottle of furniture-polish, fell and tore her skirt, Gertrude knew the name of the dressmaker who had made that skirt–and it was the right one for a woman of that class, at that date; she knew the brand of the furniture-polish that the little girl had swallowed; she knew, even, the particular exclamation that such a woman, tearing her skirt at such a moment, would have uttered–the particular sin that the woman, in thinking of her skirt at such a moment, would have committed. (The Church itself had no such casuist as Gertrude.) But how the child felt as it seized and drank the polish, how the mother felt as she caught the child to her breast–about such things as these, which have neither brand nor date, Gertrude was less knowing; would have said impatiently, ‘Everybody knows that!'”
Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution