unearths some literary gems.
From The Count of Nine, by A. A. Fair:
***
Bertha Cool twisted her face into a fatuous smile; a sweetly synthetic grin that was as foreign to her as a postage stamp on a dollar bill.
***
"Try hanging around him," I told her, "and you'll learn about the facts of life."
"I know the facts of life," Bertha said.
"You'll learn ramifications, variations."
"I've been ramified, verified, and mutated," she said.
***
Bertha kept blinking her eyes at me as though she was biting the information off in chunks with her eyelids so as to help her brain digest it. [I think this may be a more elaborate version of a similar bit that we saw ESG (aka Fair) use in the Perry Mason oeuvre.]