So this is how life was, she thought with a faint smile: It wore you down until you emerged at its wildest, most unexpected ends.

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

Henry shook his head, 'I was drunk,' he said, trying to sound both ashamed and firm in this belief. He remembered the rosebush incident very clearly, of course, but he knew that sneaking into the bedroom window of his fiancee's little sister wasn't something he wanted to explain to his father. Sometimes, Henry reflected, being taken for a perpetual drunk was sort of convenient.

Among her other talents were forgetting what she did not like and ignoring what she preferred not to see.

It seemed to her as though everything that was good and true had been blasted out of the world. All those things had been crushed destroyed made to disappear.

Her life, she realized, had all the charm of a steel trap.

Good night.' Diana summoned all the dignity that she could manage in her bedraggled state and began to move back up the beach. Her dress was soaked and her stockings dotted with sand and her heart couldn't possibly withstand any more.