“What is she writing? Watch her now,How fast her fingers move!How eagerly her youthful browIs bent in thought above!Her long curls, drooping, shade the light,She puts them quick aside.”

“She lay on her back and walked her fingers down her ribs, skipped them over her abdomen, and landed on her pelvic bones. She tapped them with her Knuckles. [. . .] I can hear my bones, she thought. Her fingers moved up from her pelvic bones to her waist. The elastic of her underpants barely touched the center of her abdomen. The bridge is almost finished, she thought. The elastic hung loosely around each thigh. More progress. She put her knees together and raised them in the air. No matter how tightly she pressed them together, her thighs did not touch.”

“The sight made her ache. How can I not touch you? she thought hopelessly, and then she was doing it, her fingers on his wrist. He didn't jump or even look at her, just stopped writing. Neither one of them moved, nothing moved, and the whole thing lasted three or four seconds at most, but when Pen took her hand away and started to breathe again, her chest hurt, as though she had been holding her breath for a very long time.”

“Lying in their field above the sea, watching the sun go down and the darkness creep over the field so that they were wrapped together in shadow. Will propped himself on one elbow beside her, is finger curling strands of her dark hair until it was bound so tight it pulled her scalp and she cried out, and then he bent over her, kissed her, so,so tenderly, and she thought she would die with happiness. They had made love, the very first time.”

“She raised one hand and flexed its fingers and wondered, as she had sometimes before, how this thing, this machine for gripping, this fleshy spider on the end of her arm, came to be hers, entirely at her command. Or did it have some little life of its own? She bent her finger and straightened it. The mystery was in the instant before it moved, the dividing moment between not moving and moving, when her intention took effect. It was like a wave breaking. If she could only find herself at the crest, she thought, she might find the secret of herself, that part of her that was really in charge.”

“There seemed something rather devotional about her pose, the still­ness, so that I thought at last, She is praying!, and made to draw my eyes away in sudden shame. But then she stirred. Her hands opened, she raised them to her cheek, and I caught a flash of colour against the pink of her work-roughened palms. She had a flower there, between her fingers—a violet, with a drooping stem. As I watched, she put the flower to her lips, and breathed upon it, and the purple of the petals gave a quiver and seemed to glow . . .”