Something in her little soul was old enough and woman enough to feel the irresistible, stinging joy of being needed; she sat rocking his head back and forth, until his grief expended itself in emptiness.

Before she continued her search she sat in his revolving desk chair, and wept for the passing of time, and the necessary death of the well-loved, wise old man.

She watched him recede into the past as he stood...each successive moment of him passing before her eyes and being lost forever.

His image shifted jerkily once, twice. She caught the sound of his voice deconstructed into halting and meaningless syllables. And then the window went dark.

He trembled with his head hung low.

Her grief grieved her. His devastated her.

He bent above: so still her breath
What air she breathed he could not say,
Whether in worlds of life or death:
So softly ebbed away, away
The life that had been light to him,
So fled her beauty leaving dim
The emptying chambers of his heart
Thrilled only by the pang and smart,
The dull and throbbing agony
That suffers still, yet knows not why.

he was doing nothing, thinking of nothing, looking at nothing; he was merely suffering.

Years passed; and he endured the idleness of his intelligence and the inertia of his heart.

"Hush, now", she said, stroking his head. "Hush. Dilsey got you." But he bellowed slowly, abjectly, without tears; the grave hopeless sound of all voiceless misery under the sound.

Como se ve, aquella cabeza, tan serena y fría hasta entonces, atravesaba un periodo de extravío lamentable, de delirio completo.

Sometimes she'd go a whole day without thinking of him or missing him. Why not? She had quite a full life, and really, he'd often been hard to deal with and hard to live with. A project, the Yankee oldtimers like her very own Dad might have said. And then sometimes a day would come, a gray one (or a sunny one) when she missed him so fiercely she felt empty, not a woman at all anymore but just a dead tree filled with cold November blow. She felt like that now, felt like hollering his name and hollering him home, and her heart turned sick with the thought of the years ahead and she wondered what good love was if it came to this, to even ten seconds of feeling like this.

...and the vessel was not full, his intellect was not satisfied, his soul was not at peace, his heart was not still.

She let him finish, scratching his head with the tips of her fingers, and without his having revealed that he was weeping from love, she recognized immediately the oldest sobs in the history of man.