An Impossible Impostor

You have health and beauty and wit so sharp a man might cut himself and think the bleeding a privilege.

It was astonishing, I mused, how often people claimed to be honest when they were simply making a virtue of excessive rudeness.

It takes courage to live a good life, Harry, but it also takes courage to live like a blackguard. Both require difficult choices. Both require hardship and endurance and patience. There is, in the end, little difference between the good and the bad. Only one of these lives requires you to look over your shoulder all the while and the other one makes it a little easier to sleep at night.

Perhaps I have simply decided that if such misadventures are the price I must pay to have you in my life, I am content to pay them.

the bond between my image of myself and my own identity stretched until it had at last snapped.

What, I began to wonder, was the point of allowing a gentleman access to one’s bed and heart if he could not interpret a lady’s most irrational moods?

I had forgot," I said slowly, "Forgot what?" "That talking to you is like staring into a carnival looking glass. Up is down, down is up, Nothing makes sense." "Of course it does." His voice was gentle and his smile back in evidence. "Veronica, do you think I enjoy playing the villain? I loathe it. I want only to be left alone, but like any creature, I will fight if I am cornered...

Within a month the ring was gone, pawned to pay a debt, and I realized what I had done. I had shackled myself to a man who could not be trusted, upon whom I could never truly depend. Too late, I understood the magnitude of a woman's vulnerability in marriage, how every particle of her happiness depends upon her choosing well. And I had chosen unwisely.

I have never been inclined to like children myself,” I admitted. “I am far more content with butterflies and dogs.

Too late, I understood the magnitude of a woman’s vulnerability in marriage, how every particle of her happiness depends upon her choosing well. And I had chosen unwisely.

Mary Hathaway is the worst sort of provincial," I put in. We smiled at one another, bonded - as women frequently are - by our mutual dislike of another.