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Falling in love was revealing to her just how odd she was, how habitually sealed off in her everyday thoughts. Whenever Edward asked, How do you feel?, or, What are you thinking? she always made an awkward answer. Had it taken her this long to discover that she lacked some simple mental trick that everyone else had, a mechanism so ordinary that no one ever mentioned it, an immediate sensual connection to people and events, and to her own needs and desires? All these years she had lived in isolation within herself and, strangely, from herself, never wanting or daring to look back.

(...)she did not mind making her bed every morning - she had always done so - but she resented being asked at each breakfast whether she had.

The moment was rising to meet her, just as she was foolishly moving towards it. She was trapped in a game whose rules she could not question. She could not escape the logic that had her leading, or towing, Edward across the room towards the open door of the bedroom and the narrow four-poster bed and its smooth white cover.

How could he fail to love someone so strangely and warmly particular, so painfully honest and self-aware, whose every thought and emotion appeared naked to view, streaming like charged particles through her changing expressions and gestures?

She would trip over her feet if she thought she was being watched - she confided in Edward that she found it an ordeal to be in the street, walking towards a friend from a distance.

Edward laid his hand over Florence's and said, for the hundredth time that day, in a whisper, 'I love you,' and she said it straight back, and she truly meant it.

This was still the era - it would end later in that famous decade - when to be young was a social encumbrance, a mark of irrelevance, a faintly embarrassing condition for which marriage was the beginning of a cure.

Og hva sto i veien for dem? Personlighetene og forhistorien, uvitenheten og frykten, lettskremtheten, feigheten, mangelen på selvstendighet, erfaring og en avslappet holdning, i tillegg til halehenget fra de religiøse forbud, britiskheten og klassetilhørigheten og selve historien. Ikke så mye egentlig.

How could she have known what a terrible mistake she was making? Had she pulled on the wrong thing? Had she gripped too tight? He gave out a wail, a complicated series of agonised, rising wovels, the sort of sound she had heard once in a comedy film when a waiter, weaving this way and that, appeared to be about to drop a towering pile of soup plates.

With his lips clamped firmly onto hers, he probed the fleshy floor of her mouth, then moved round inside the teeth of her lower jaw to the empty place where three years ago a wisdom tooth had crookedly grown until removed under general anaesthesia.