Chapter 22Michael went to bed that night in a thoroughly disturbed state. Louise Cassell was nothing if not provocative, it seemed to him, and he was not always altogether comfortable when he was in her company.
At times he wondered whether she was pulling his leg and he'd clam up. He found her exciting, though. Her perfume clung to him as he lay there in bed, playing the events of the previous few hours through in his mind. Were they courting now, then? he wondered.
It occurred to him that he had read a lot about love in the novels of Jane Austen and Tolstoy and Dickens and Fielding, and in the poetry of Shakespeare, and of Donne and Marvell and Byron, but that, for all his reading, he really knew next to nothing about it when it came to the real thing.
He could still recall the way Lo
