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Of all the nations I have visited the U.S.A. and Russia suit me best. The people seem more ready to talk to strangers without being formal or disapproving. Is this because, like me, they have very little past?

And this was the hallmark of Harriet’s touch: she could scare the daylights out of you, and you weren’t even sure why.

“It’s awful being a child,” she said, simply, “at the mercy of other people.”

Harriet reflected upon how life had beaten down the adults she knew, every single grown-up. Something strangled them as they grew older, made them doubt their own powers—laziness? Habit? Their grip slackened; they stopped fighting and resigned themselves to what happened. “That’s Life.” That’s what they all said. “That’s Life, Harriet, that’s just how it is, you’ll see.”

Well: Harriet would not see.

Birds can sing and fish can swim and I can do this.

And the sweetness of the thought struck her: how lovely to vanish off the face of the earth, what a sweet dream to vanish now, out of her body: poof, like a spirit. Chains clattering empty to the floor.

She had almost been a hero. But now, she feared, she wasn’t a hero at all, but something else entirely.

She’d learned things she never knew, things she had no idea of knowing, and yet in a strange way it was the hidden message of Captain Scott: that victory and collapse were sometimes the same thing.

And if what she’d wanted had been impossible from the start, still there was a certain lonely comfort in the fact that she’d known it was impossible and had gone ahead and done it anyway.

There was nothing heroic in what I did next, dealing with the baby and my own car and the stalled nose-to-tail traffic that made the three miles to the babysitter’s seem like a trek across the wastelands of the earth—it was just life, that was all