“She wondered then if she had ever been on the right track. She had been reticent all her life, because it turned out that her opinions were different from what others expected. 'That proves either that I am an exceptional idiot, or the reverse.”

“If she had been born a hundred years later, she would very likely have been encouraged to be angry, told she had a right to express her anger and her sorrow and her bewilderment and her rage, and generally to disintegrate. These were not the expectations of her friends and family. Nothing could have been further from her expectations of herself. Instead, she threw herself into serving others.”

“She had been sharing a house with him for a week, and he had not once flirted with her. He had worked with her, asked her opinion, slapped her on the knuckles figuratively speaking when she was on the wrong track, and acknowledged that she was right when she corrected him. Dammit, he had treated her like a human being.”

“But it did not stop her from wishing that it had all been different. Wishing that she had had the chance to be everything daughters of earls were born to be. Wishing that she'd been raised without a care in the world. Without a doubt in her head that it would someday be her day to sparkle; that she would one day be courted properly - by a man who wanted her for her, not as a spoil from a game of chance.Wishing that she were not so very alone.Not that wishing had ever helped.”

“Men she knew'? - she had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends.”

“She loved him because he had brought her back to life. She had been like a caterpillar in a cocoon, and he had drawn her out and shown her that she was a butterfly.”