He dashed into the president's house; he shouted from the door, erect, while they knelt and looked up at him mousily, "It's come!

Her stooped shoulders draped in a drab brown cardigan, she bustles mousily around the offices of a big construction firm, where she works as a receptionist.

He has never been one to submit himself mousily to corporate strictures: "I say what I think," he says, and what he thinks strikes some as refreshingly honest and others as childishly indiscreet.

"I look as if I wandered in off the street," Mr. Lubin said of Grandma's customary demeanor, which is at once mousily fussy, grandly ladylike, slyly mischievous, improbably acrobatic and perpetually transgressive.