It is easy to forget now, how effervescent and free we all felt that summer. Everything fades: the shimmer of gold over White Cove; the laughter in the night air; the lavender early morning light on the faces of skyscrapers, which had suddenly become so heroically tall. Every dawn seemed to promise fresh miracles, among other joys that are in short supply these days. And so I will try to tell you, while I still remember, how it was then, before everything changed-that final season of the era that roared.

She was like a heroine in a novel that she herself was writing the character kept protesting that she was too strong for love and yet the narrator went on describing her desire.

Henry was thinking of the younger Holland sister of the way she could go from being an impetuous girl to a knowing woman in a few seconds and never lose the stars in her eyes.

After Henry's treatment of her she wasn't sure that men could honestly love women but she wanted to believe it. She wanted to be told pretty things and for the frightening clip of her heart to slow to something more reasonable.

Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn't be.

That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she'd always believed took their fate into their own hands.

There was no pleasure like being envied on a mass scale.