That was how the heroine of a book would play it and Diana was still writing her own story the best heroines she’d always believed took their fate into their own hands.
After Henry’s treatment of her she wasn’t sure that men could honestly love women but she wanted to believe it. She wanted to be told pretty things and for the frightening clip of her heart to slow to something more reasonable.
Her heart the damned thing had begun to race and she only hoped that the rapid inflation and deflation of her chest wasn’t visible beneath her fitted bodice.
Always stay sharp on railways and cruise ships for transit has a way of making everything clear.
It is well known that a man, when wooing a lady to be his wife, must first win over the females she most confides in – her friends, of course, and her sister, if she has one.
You don’t need to marry a man with millions. You only need to be your exquisite self.
But in that moment she realized how false most smiles were and what a tremendous waste of time.
He was just like summer, and she loved summer. If she had any wish, it would be to live a lifetime of summers.
I can’t imagine what my life was before. I can’t imagine ever being without you for very long again.
Henry was thinking of the younger Holland sister of the way she could go from being an impetuous girl to a knowing woman in a few seconds and never lose the stars in her eyes.
Girls took to dressing like boys, and though women had obtained the vote, we had swiftly moved on to pursuing flashier freedoms: necking in cars and smoking cigarettes and walking down city streets in flesh colored stockings.
Among her other talents were forgetting what she did not like and ignoring what she preferred not to see.
That is what I want to tell you about: the girls with their short skirts and bright eyes and big-city dreams. The girls of 1929.
In New York there is always something to look at, but it is all infinitely more interesting through a window in the backseat of a limousine.
It is a fact of big cities that one girl’s darkest how is always another’s moment of shining triumph, and New York is the biggest and cruelest city of them all.
Though her emotions had not deviated from a jittery frailty she knew that in her own room she could at least attempt sleep and that if she dreamed she might then finally be with Henry.
That was the way love was, she guessed-it left you always unsteady on your feet.
To look in the face of hard things and keep moving forward – that’s what one has to do.
The living are made of nothing but flaws. The dead, with each passing day in the afterlife, become more and more impeccable to those who remain earthbound.
Diana felt she was beginning to understand why, in all those novels she read, the headiest loves were the loves that couldn’t be.