Peter would think her sentimental. So she was. For she had come to feel that it was the only thing worth saying – what one felt. Cleverness was silly. One must say simply what one felt.

I am writing to a rhythm and not to a plot.

In marriage a little licence, a little independence there must be between people living together day in and day out in the same house.

Vain trifles as they seem, clothes have, they say, more important offices than to merely keep us warm. They change our view of the world and the world's view of us.

Her life-that was the only chance she had-the short season between two silences.

...the problem of space remained, she thought, taking up her brush again. It glared at her. The whole mass of the picture was poised upon that weight. Beautiful and bright it should be on the surface, feathery and evanescent, one colour melting into another like the colours on a butterfly's wing; but beneath the fabric must be clamped together with bolts of iron.

If only she could put them together, she felt, write them out in some sentence, then she would have got at the truth of things.