This sentimental comedy by the Soviet playwright Aleksei Arbuzov is said to have had a great success in its own country. So do fringed lamp shades.

In the middle of the silence in a writer's house lies an invalid: the book being worked on.

A kind of duet-she as oboe, he as contrabassoon, and full of obbligato digressions.

[He] is a tall, grandly built man; [she] tall and delicate. Both are narrow-faced with long, imperial noses; as they pose for pictures, it is a turkey buzzard sharing companionably with an egret.

A prettiness mummified by years of chalk dust.

Well I sure had been looking for a comedy for years without success. Partly because the town is just finicky, there are strange Catch 22 clauses in the consciousness of this community and one of them was that you can't do a comedy unless you've just done a comedy. They won't let you,