But a topee is not a turban, and I had been my teacher's pupil before I became my husband's wife, learning to my bones that half a disguise is none at all...The moment my short-cropped, pomade-sleek, unquestionably masculine hair passed beneath his nose was the closest thing I've ever seen Holmes to fainting dead away.

Travel broadens, they say. My personal experience has been that, in the short term at any rate, it merely flattens, aiming its steam-roller of deadlines and details straight at one's daily life, leaving a person flat and gasping at its passage.

Why the devil was my husband positively grinning - and with what looked remarkably like relief?

...but somehow the madness around me and the turmoil I carried within myself acted as counterweights, and I survived in the centre.

Impossibility is a log thrown on the fires of love.

Only the careless leave a possibility unattended due to assumptions.

You cannot help being a female, and I should be something of a fool were I to discount your talents merely because of their housing.