It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming. - Kathleen Winter

Summer sky swallowed colour, but the sky of late August made colour ricochet back to earth, and there were sharp edges on all the buildings and curbs and even on the leaves of the trees and on the impatiens in the flowerbeds of all the towns through which Wayne travelled to reach Wally Michelin.

Whereas he struck out on his own to decide how to erase the frightening ambiguity in their child, she envisioned living with it as it was . . . Whenever she imagined her child, grown up without interference from a judgemental world, she imagined its male and female halves as complementing each other, and as being secretly, almost magically powerful.

This was a passage in which everyone moved and was unfathomable, which was how Thomasina saw people. She was not a person who froze someone's character in her mind, calling this one egotistical and that one not nearly confident enough and another one truthful or untruthful. To Thomasina people were rivers, always ready to move from one state of being into another. It was not fair, she felt, to treat people as if they were finished beings. Everyone was always becoming and unbecoming.