good writing
“In her blue dress, with her cheeks lightly flushed, her blue, blue eyes, and her gold curls pinned up as though for the first time—pinned up to be out of the way for her flight—Mrs. Raddick’s daughter might have just dropped from this radiant heaven. Mrs. Raddick’s timid, faintly astonished, but deeply admiring glance looked as if she believed it, too; but the daughter didn’t appear any too pleased—why should she?—to have alighted on the steps of the Casino. Indeed, she was bored—bored as though Heaven had been full of casinos with snuffy old saints for croupiers and crowns to play with.”
Katherine Mansfield, “The Young Girl.”
It’s all about the word Casino. Each of the words preceding Casino is awful (they’re exactly the types of words you’d expect to find nearby a pretty girl), Casino is excellent (it represents exploitation; it ends in an “o”), and then you get three more excellent words immediately: “bored,” “snuffy,” and “croupiers.” It’s like an avalanche. “Saints” is also good because it forces you to think about heaven, which earlier in the paragraph you ignored for seeming like a cliche.
