Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess.

Long-married couples balance their checkbooks as a substitute for love-making, or they refuse each other love by protesting one another's financial error or excess.

Wit isn't a useful instrument of defense; it may make a short-run appeal, but it creates a backlash- one saw this in the Hiss case and the Oppenheimer hearings; certainly one saw it in the trial of Oscar Wilde.

Behind the contained and orderly lives we lead as members of the respectable middle class there's a terrible human capacity that may one day overwhelm any of us.

In the bad sixties, when drugs came into widespread use among adolescents and when Scarsdale mothers developed the habit of not asking about each others children for fear of what they'd hear, one knew that they were speaking-or not speaking, keeping their unhappy silence-on behalf of stricken motherhood everywhere in the country.

At best-which is to say, even where our knowledge of a case comes to us only through courtroom evidence-it is difficult for the legal process to keep us at a sanitizing distance from crimes of passion.

Privacy, after all, was the most relative of privileges. It was granted us by society under ungenerous conditions, the most fundamental of them that whether for pain or profit, by design or accident, we not call public attention to ourselves.