People were willing to worship the Golden Calf, but allowed themselves a choice of altars.

No one could justly say that the Shalems were either oppressively vulgar or insufferably bumptious; probably the chief reason for their lack of popularity was their intense and obvious desire to be popular.

They kept open house in such an insistently open manner that they created a social draught.

The people who accepted their invitations for the second or third time were not the sort of people whose names gave importance to a dinner party or a house gathering.

Failure, in a thinly-disguised form, attended the assiduous efforts of the Shalems to play a leading role in the world that they had climbed into.