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Elizabeth Navenby was known for three things: needlework, talking to the dead, and an ill temper at the best of times.
At which point Elizabeth had called him an imposing busybody and strode past, leaving Miss Blyth making apologies in her wake. Pointless. Men would never learn to behave if you apologised at them.
She felt a ludicrous pang of disappointment. Firstly, that she had squeaked. Secondly, that she hadn’t seized the opportunity to say Fuck. She’d never been game enough on any lesser occasion, and surely this was the most obscenity-deserving situation she would ever find herself in.
He wasn’t born a girl, let alone one of five. He’d never grown out of childhood feeling himself get taller and taller as the life expected of him grew smaller and smaller, until he could barely breathe for the confines of it.
There was a high, firm wall beneath the constant performance that was Violet Debenham. She was the opposite to Edwin; his walls were all up front, the warmth there beneath them if you had the patience to wait to be granted entry. Violet’s warmth was on the outside. Sweets spread temptingly out on a blanket. Pause and let yourself accept the entertainment, the offering, and you might not notice the wall at all.
A kiss was a kiss alone, until the next kiss was bestowed. Asking a man for his mouth on you didn’t mean you’d agreed to have his cock inside you next, no matter what some might think.
“The audience likes seeing men dressed as women and women dressed as men, so they can laugh over it. Of course, they don’t laugh so merrily when faced with someone who prefers to live in what society thinks of as the wrong clothes all the time.”
“Mrs. Sinclair says you look at the world and decide you can live with it or decide you can’t. And if you can’t, you decide what you’re prepared to do about it.”
But if I have to create myself every day, with every choice I make, then I want to make the choices I won’t regret when I look back on my life at its end.”
