What must be done must be done, whatever the price, the cost, the pain. One day we all must walk through fire.

And still you'll hesitate to tell him, won't you? Why? Because you're a woman? Is your destiny such a small thing then? To keep your legs open and your mouth shut?

Tomorrow and tomorrow come creeping in and always will. We're fools trapped in a mechanism of our own unconscious making. Shadows strutting and fretting for one brief hour upon a stage, then heard no more. I'll weep an ocean in my heart, if the world would give me time. But not now.

You speak as if this is a good world with a little evil in it. Rubbish. It's a hellish one where the best a man can do is put a little sanity back and look after his own.

There are no secrets.' The thing smiled, showing a row of even, childlike teeth. 'None worth keeping. Only the ones you hide from yourself, which are the most damaging and hurtful of all. Truth is truth, and lie is lie. Tell yourself one's the other and all the world turns kilter.

Do I dream you? Or you dream me? Or does someone, something bigger than all' - her hands swept the vast constellations above them - 'this beauteous calamity, dream everything we see and more?

To watch. To wait. To wonder at a world in chaos,' the girl said. 'And hope one day you fools might learn.

In their vanity men focus on what they wish to hear and miss the hidden meaning, the lurking threat.