Brooke Astor

'21' was the place, and you went down, and they opened the door. They had a little slit they'd look through, and then you'd murmur the password or whatever it was you had, showed a little ticket, and if they remembered who you were, you went in.

The way that Dickens structured his books has a form that we most readily recognize now from, say, the great T.V. series, like 'The Wire' or 'The Sopranos.' There's one central plot line, but then from that spin off all kinds of subplots.