A Company of Swans

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

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...

The news should have terrified her, but it was difficult to be frightened of anything when she was sitting so close to Rom. 'I thought we had convinced him that I was leading a blameless life?' 'We had, till you burst out of that damnable cake.

There are those who dance the notes, and those who dance the music.

Yet for a moment it seemed to him that the men who had dragged marble from Italy and porphyry from Portugal, who had ransacked the jungle for its rarest woods and paid their millions to build this opulent and fantastical theatre, had done so in order that a young girl with loose brown hair should move across its stage, drawing her future from its empty air.

And lying there, her hair in damp strands across her crumpled face, Harriet gave up the long, long struggle to love her father and her aunt. "It was for this loss above all that she wept. She had learned, during the long years of her childhood, to live without receiving love. To live without giving it seemed more than she could bear.

-they were still practicing the fiendishly difficult pattern at the end of the act where the diagonal lines of swans cross over and dissolve to form three groups: unequal groups, since the number seventeen is notoriously difficult to divide by three.