Now I understood that the same road was to bring us together again. Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past.

I first met Myra Henshawe when I was fifteen, but I had known her about ever since I could remember anything at all.

All Southern women wished of their menfolk was simply to be 'like Paris handsome and like Hector brave'.

[Some] people really expect the passion of love to fill and gratify every need of life, whereas nature only intended that it should meet one of many demands. They insist on making it stand for all the emotional pleasures of life and art; expecting an individual and self-limited passion to yield infinite variety, pleasure, and distraction, and to contribute to their lives what the arts and the pleasurable exercise of the intellect gives to less limited and less intense idealists.

Henry Colbert, the miller, always breakfasted with his wife--beyond that he appeared irregularly at the family table.

Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody.

I was thinking, as I watched her, how little it mattered –about her teeth for instance. I know so many women who have kept all the things she had lost, *but whose inner glow has faded*. Whatever else was gone, Antonia had not lost the fire of life.