The sisters worked from dawn to dusk. One of them was an idiot; she started shaving her legs and marrying tax inspectors, so she was no good.

Just because we've never done it doesn't mean we can't do it.

That's silly, Anna," said the Honorable Olive. "Being afraid is silly, you know it is.

And so they played some of the world's loveliest piano music - the exiled homesick girl, the humiliated, tired old man. Not properly. Better than that.

She was so intelligent that she could think herself into beauty. Intelligence...they don't talk about it much, the poets, but when a woman is intelligent and passionate and good.

Loneliness had taught Harriet that there was always someone who understood - it was just so often that they were dead, and in a book.

Pauline kept a scrapbook into which she pasted important articles that she had cut out of the newspapers. These were about the courageous deeds that had been done by people even if they only had one leg or couldn't see or had been dropped on their heads when they were babies. 'It's to make me brave,' she'd explained to Annika.