QUOTE : She'd insulted Manuel HaLevy today because he angered her - yet, she admitted, also to pique him. For those Esther disliked him, still her body had woken to his challenge - just as every caged part of her, her thoughts, her breath, her pulse, seemed to wake now to this city from which she'd hidden herself. London, which had consumed her brother; London of her mother's drunken, eviscerating whispers. The very language spoken on the streets fired Esther strangely - as if a thing long shuttered in her spirit had, quietly and all at once, quickened.