He wanted something, he realizes now. Wanted an answer other than the ones he’d been given. Wanted to find out this whole world had some purpose, some particular purpose. For him.

I want—I want—I want—was all that she could think about—but just what this real want was she did not know.

Intrigued by that enigma, he dug so deeply into her sentiments that in search of interest he found love, because by trying to make her love him he ended up falling in love with her.

She understood him. He could not forgive her,-but he could not be unfeeling. Though condemning her for the past, and considering it with high and unjest resentment, though perfectly careless of her, and though becoming attached to another, still he could not see her suffer, without the desire of giving her relief. It was a remainder of former sentiment; it was an impuse of pure, though unacknowledged friendship; it was a proof of his own warm and amiable heart, which she could not contemplate without emotions so compounded of pleasure and pain, that she knew not which prevailed.

At that moment he knew what his mother was thinking, and that she loved him. But he knew, too, that to love someone means relatively little; or, rather, that love is never wrong enough to find the word befitting it.

He loved her so passionately he wanted her to be one soul and one body with him; and he was conscious that here, with those deep roots attaching her to the native life, she would always keep something from him.

This is what love is, he thought. Doing what you don't want to do, because she needs it so much. And it isn't that bad. And it isn't that hard.

She knew that he loved her above all else, more than anything in the world, but only for his own sake.

She did not know what it was about him that had always made her want to see him broken.

Enid was meant for him and she had come for him; he would never let her go. She should never know how much he longed for her. She would be slow to feel even a little of what he was feeling; he knew that. It would take a long while. But he would be infinitely patient, infinitely tender of her. It should be he who suffered, not she...When he was with her, he thought how she was to be the one who would put him right with the world and make him fit into the life about him.

She would tell him what she wanted in her life — her hopes and dreams for the future — and he would listen intently and then promise to make it all come true. And the way he said it made her believe him, and she knew how much he meant to her.

Then she wished, more rationally, that she could love him without needing him. Need gave him power without his trying; need was the choicelessness she often felt around him.

She had tried to love him.

What was it like, he wondered, to care about something so passionately? He suspected it made her somehow more alive than he was.