"The image and the life: well, she was used to that. There was Pauline and there was the image - feather boa flung about, winking at the camera, it was fun. High in confidence. Low in confidence. (...) Diamonds are a girl's, my armpits are charmpits (gasps at the word armpits, not a word ever heard out loud). At the Royal College, where girls were so rare they made you stare, where the architects hadn't bothered putting women's toilets in the blueprint, she walked the corridors hearing the whispers as she went by, rumour is, that one there's actually read Proust, she put her arm round the boy and said it's true darling and Genet and de Beauvoir and Rimbaud and Colette, I've read all the men and the women of French letters, oh and Gertrude Stein as well, don't you know about women and their tender buttons?"