...the passion of love separated its victim terribly from everyone but the loved object. - Henry James

Madame Merle had once said that, in her belief, when a friendship ceased to grow, it immediately began to decline - there was no point of equilibrium between liking a person more and liking him less.

"If I should cease to think of you at all for a prescribed time, I should find I could keep it up indefinitely. [...] You know that what you ask is impossible [...] I'm capable of nothing with regard to you," he went on, "but just of being infernally in love with you. If one's strong one loves only the more strongly."

He had thought, no doubt, from the day he was born, much more than he had acted; except indeed that he remembered thoughts — a few of them — which at the moment of their coming to him had thrilled him almost like adventures.