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regular light and dark squares. An intense latticelike shadow lay flat beneath a garden bench. The urns that stood on stone pedestals at the four corners of the terrace threatened one another across their diagonals. Swallows soared: their flight recalled the motion of scissors swiftly cutting out some design.

p 63 ...The most obvious explanation did not occur to him, just as sometimes in solving a problem its key turns out to be a move that seemed barred, impossible, excluded quite naturally from the range of possible moves.

p 77 Time to do a little summing up, he thought and looked around the empty room- tablecloth, blue wallpaper, still life - the way one looks at a room where a famous man was born.

p 83 Lughin looked at his hand, splaying the fingers and then closing them up again. The nails, tawny with moisture, had ragged cuticles around them; fat

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little furrows ran across the finger joints and a few hairs grew lower down. He placed his hand on the table next to her hand, milky-pale and soft to look at, with short, neatly trimmed nails.

p 85 She was not particularly pretty, there was something lacking in her small regular features, as if the last decisive jog that would have made her beautiful - leaving her features the same but endowing them with an ineffable significance - had not been given them by nature. But she was twenty-five, her fashionably bobbed hair was neat and lovely and she had one turn of the head which betrayed a hint of possible harmony, a promise of real beauty that at the last moment remained unfulfilled.

p 103 He seized her by the elbow and kissed something hard and cold - her wristwatch.

p 93 ... the movie business, that mysterious astrological business where they read