A Sensible Life

von Mary Wesley

She was a thin, lonely child with huge eyes and an extensive vocabulary of French foul language. Amongst the elegant middle-class British families holidaying in Dinard in 1926 - leading their privileged lives of secure routine pleasures - Flora was a ten-year-old misfit. Ignored by her self-absorbed parents, unloved, and pitied by the pleasant, stylish people in Brittany that summer, Flora was - peripherally - included in their gracious circles. And there, meeting kindly civilised people for the first time, she fell in love - with Cosmo - with Hubert - with Felix. It took forty years for the love affairs to be explored, consummated, and finally resolved.