A narrow and deserted street in deep shadow, high houses, innumerable windows with Venetian blinds, a dead silence, grass sprouting between the stones, imposing carriage archways right and left, immense double doors standing ponderously ajar.

Laurie tells him to stop being such a little girl and do something bad for once.

Marie who? A number of suggestions have been proposed for the identity of this wonderful twelfth-century poet. Marie, Abbess of Shaftesbury, the illegitimate daughter of Geoffrey Plantagenet and half-sister to Henry II, King of England, is a plausible candidate, but Marie, Abbess of Reading, Marie I of Boulogne, Marie, Abbess of Barking, and Marie de Meulan, wife of Hugh Talbot, are all possibilities. There were a lot of Maries, after all, but only a few could read and write in English, Latin, and Anglo-Norman French.

I know now there should have been no higher beatitude than to live in the presence of an unselfish, unasking, vital love.