Minerva’s Reviews > A Room Made of Leaves > Status Update

As mistress of Elizabeth Farm, every day had its vexation. But each new vexation brought the memory of the last, and the fact that it has been solved. Vexation was vexing, but idleness was like death.

But his orbit is a fraction eccentric as it passes through our merely human sphere.

I had come through pan and fear, had like every women in childbed been within a hands brush of death. I had proved myself stronger than life had asked him to be. Had come back knowing something that would never be known to him. It was a secret knowledge, secret because it could not be told, only lived through.

We could see that men, when they could, took their pleasure with a woman, more or less any woman. And that women, when they could, took a man, no matter what he was like, if he could offer them a future.

I became somewhat not totally removed from herself, but not quite herself either. Someone more obliging, more agreeable. someone who had folded herself up small and put herself carefully away, where no one could see her.