Before that, students and professors could date whomever we wanted; the next day we were off-limits to one another—verboten, traife, dangerous (and perhaps, therefore, all the more alluring).

I snapped to rigid attention when the teacher barked, Clear your desks, get your number two pencils out, and get ready for your exam. Exam! What exam?

Lindy herself hated the name Lindy. She said it sounded like a girl in pink gingham. At the beginning of this school year she'd started making all the teachers address her by her full name, Linnet. (She'd been named for an English bird that a soldier had mentioned to their mother during the war.) At first Karen had tried to call her that too, but it had felt so unnatural that she'd gradually given it up.

[…] there are sublettings, overcrowdings of lands, clearances, and emigrations going on; and want of employment, with consequent destitution and wretchedness is the complaint of the majority of the inhabitants.