The Noise of the World by Adriana Spadoni — Read

In the next weeks, it seemed to Anne that the world had been recreated while she and Roger loved by the lake. The old world of definite working hours, through which strangers claimed her physical energy and brain, as deeply strangers one day as the next; the old family life of repression, grown unconscious from habit; minute but never ceasing spiritual adjustment, strengthless rebellions against habits set in steel bands before one awakened to their cramping horror, all had dissolved in a community of interest in a larger and much simpler world.

In this world, men and women tried to increase happiness. They worked with ideas; many ideas and many people striving to embody them in form. Often in the mornings, after Anne had watched Roger vanish round the corner of the street far below, she continued to stand on the porch of the little cottage they had found on a rocky crag that rose from the grass-grown cobbles to a view of the bay and Tamalpais. It was like her inner life here, high above the confusions of her mother's muddled thinking, her father's petulance, Belle's brutal experience. Above the confusion of The Niche, the unironed laundry, the unreasoned bursts of Hilda's extravagances, the intrusion of uninteresting gossip. The three white-painted rooms with their sweep of bay and hills, close to the stars at night, walled from the city below by the spicy fragrance of a tangled garden, was another world.