"For Nancy, there was only one person who had never let her down. Daddy had been a darling, of course, while he lasted, but it was his mother, Dolly Keeling, who had consistently shored up Nancy's confidence and taken her side." (Chapter 1 p. 19)

"And so Penelope did what she had known all along that she would do. She reached for the telephone and dialed the number of Olivia's London office." (Prologue p. 4)

"One of the reasons that Olivia Keeling had made such a success of her career was that she had developed the ability to clear her mind, and so beam in her considerable intelligence on one set of problems at a time. She ran her life like a submarine, divided into watertight compartments, each impregnably sealed from the others." (Chapter 3, p. 40)

"It's just that ... this is the sort of place where I think I could stay. I...