Self-image and phantoms

She tries to think about Shakespeare sitting by his fire, but finds such 'historical fiction' dull. She prefers the thoughts that quietly flatter herself.

We all lovingly protect an inner image of ourselves. If that mirror broke, only the empty shell that others see would remain: a shallow world, not fit to live in.

Future novelists, she predicts, will explore these countless reflections inside people's minds, rather than describing outer reality.

Generalisations remind her of the rigid Sundays of her childhood, when there were rules for everything, even for what made a 'real' tablecloth.

Discovering that these 'standard things' were only half phantoms gave her a strange sense of illegitimate freedom. She hopes the masculine point of view, which rules our lives, and Whitaker's Table of Precedency (the official list of who ranks above whom) will go the same way.