But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.

He loved her, he loved her, and until he'd loved her she had never minded being alone....

He was the first, the only love her life, and in a nature like hers such passions take deep root and die-hard.

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

When she sat at her sewing, talking in her quiet, tranquil voice, or looking up with her clear, kind eyes, his whole being was drawn to her with the irresistible strength of a deep, calm longing for home. He wanted to humble himself before her, to bend the knee and call her holy. He always felt a strange yearning to come close to her, not only to her present self, but to her childhood and all the days he had not known her. When they were alone, he would lead her to talk of the past, of her little troubles and mistakes and the vagaries that every childhood is full of. He lived in these memories and clung to them with a restless jealousy and a languishing desire to possess and be one with these pale foreshadowings of a life which was even now glowing in richer, riper colors.

To hold her, to keep her — just as she was — with her cruelty, with her vulgarity, with her blinding blue eyes, with her miserable poetry, with her fat feet, with her impure, dry, sordid, infantile soul. All of a sudden he thought: If people are reunited in Heaven (I don’t believe it, but suppose), then how shall I stop it from creeping upon me, that shriveled, helpless, lame thing, her soul? But this is the earth, and I am, curiously enough, alive, and there is something in me and in life — -

...and though it is perhaps too facile to say that he was already in love with her, it is certainly true that from that moment on she was a permanent element in his mind.

he silently acknowledged he did love her and that he would not hesitate to give his own life to bring her safely back.

Just as he still cared more for her than for any other creature, so did he more intensely and frequently hate her.

He never had really been able to understand what it was that she wanted him for...although he felt certain that she wanted him for something real, that he filled some need for her, as she did for him, which could for lack of a more specific term be called love.

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

That he would love her no matter what she told him, and that he was the kind of man who loved her already and would love her forever.

It was such places as this, such moments that he loved above all else in life; she knew that, and she also knew that he loved them more if she could be there to experience them with him. And although he was aware that the very silences and emptinesses that touched his soul terrified her, he could not bear to be reminded of that. It was as if always he held the fresh hope that she, too, would be touched in the same way as he by solitude and the proximity to infinite things.

She was one of those, who, having, once begun, would be always in love.