QUOTE : Imagine a fade-out here, if you please, or one of those discreet rows of asterisks, to indicate the passage of time—not very much time, admittedly, as one of us was out of practice and perhaps a little overexcited— anyway, we return to the scene with the two participants lying back on their pillows, bedsheets now chastely drawn up to their chins, watched silently through the doorway by a stuffed otter and the head of a china basset hound, half-hidden under a frayed gingham tablecloth. Everything was perfectly still; it felt like no one in the whole wide world was awake but us—like we had stolen a march on time, and although our problems waited for us on the other side, these moments were ours to let float by as we pleased. How sweet it was, after so much turbulence, not even to have to talk, or think.