" It proved difficult, when it came to it, to part from her mother with a bright goodbye--though, after all, not that difficult, because this was only the beginning, and there were still two or three more goodbyes to come. For the same reason, as she made the walk down to Camberwell and along the Walworth Road, though she tried to gaze at everything in the knowledge that she might soon be taken away from it, she couldn't keep it up, she felt mannered and inauthentic--like an actress, she thought, playing a character to whom the doctor had just delivered the fatal diagnosis. "

― Sarah Waters , The Paying Guests