“She’d never had feelings about any man that were important enough to be real romantic love. Affection, lust, yes those things. Instants in time with someone that had touched her, yes that too. But she found no one for romance that she could look up to, that was real , an individual that wasn’t made up of bits and pieces of clichés, buffeted about on the tide of their wants and the opinions of others, no goal, no point of view that they understood themselves why they held it. She had researched him when she was assigned to protect him, she told him.She had not understood in the beginning. “You were a man that had it all! Worthy and courageous military action; you grew up, came of age in war. A successful career, status in letters, a full professorship at a prestigious university if you wanted it. Accrued wealth and income enough to live however you wanted. Beautiful women in your life … you do not show the full measure of your years in either looks or fitness.“You were a full fledged member of the oligarchy, though at a modest level. Yet you threw it all away! You started your novel, became a thorn in the side of the establishment,” she told him. “I didn’t understand until I read the fragment of manuscript that you had Jean Augereau print out for you. You were on a crusade … totally focused! I saw that you were something special then,” she told him, “That’s when you began to become very special to me!”

“What did you do to your hair? I don’t like it asmuch.”His brow knitted. “How do you like it?”“I prefer the curls.”He looked as if she’d told him she preferred him with three eyes. “You used to make fun of them. You told me that if Bo Peep had a child with one of her sheep it would have hair like mine.”She burst out laughing—and gasped at the pain that shot through her scalp. “You are not making it up, are you? Did I really say that?”“Sometimes you called me Goldilocks.”She had to remind herself not to laugh again. “And you married me? I sound like a very odious sort of girl.”“I was a very odious sort of boy, so you might say we were evenly matched.”She didn’t know enough to comment upon that, but when he was near, she was… happier.”

“When is the last time you were a tourist?” she asked archly.He just looked at her. Charles, she had to agree, was not tourist material.“Right,” Anna told him. “Buck up. You might even enjoy it.”“You might as well have ‘hapless victim’ tattooed across your forehead,” he muttered.”

“Real, she imagined later on, was something else; it had nothing to do with things you could touch. Real was being seen, noticed, acknowledged, and later remembered. Real was people thinking about you when you weren't in the room. If others thought about you, then you must be more than a made-up dream. You need other people to be real, she decided. Otherwise you might just be a speck, an atom, inventing an elaborate story. It seemed like a paradox, but it must be so. She knew other people were real by thinking about them. Her thinking of her parents and her brothers, her school friends, were proof that they were real. They were both outside and in her head. But how could she be sure she was in anyone's head?”

“He did not suppose, from what he could remember of her, that she had been an unusual women, still less an intelligent one; and yet she had possessed a kind of nobility, a kind of purity, simply because the standards that she obeyed were private ones. Her feelings were her own, and could not be altered from the outside. It would not have occurred to her that an action which is ineffectual thereby becomes meaningless. If you loved someone, you loved him, and when you had nothing else to give, you still gave him love.”

“A way of looking at you that told you she was listening, that she understood all you were saying, and all you weren't.”