"When I was a small child, collecting petals in the rose garden or loitering at the back of the house in the stable yard, it seemed that Wideacre was the very centre of the world with the sun defining our boundaries in the east at dawn, till it sank over our hills in the west in the red and pink evening. The great arch it traced in the sky over Wideacre seemed to be a suitable boundary for our vertical influence. Behind the sun were god and the angels: beneath it, and far more significantly, ruled the Squire, my father," Chapter One, p. 1.

"Papa had not ceased to love me. I knew that. But I had lost his attention. He had broken the thread of constant companionship which had held me ever since he took my pony on a leading rein and which had kept my mare to...