All That Is

He realized how deeply in love he was. She had it in her power to bestow immense happiness.

“This may sound crazy,” he would say, “but I still want her. I can’t help it. I’ve never thought about killing anyone, but in that courtroom I could have killed her. She knew all along what she was doing, I never would have believed it.”

He was certain she liked him, but at the same time he was nervous about putting it to the test. He hated the idea of being awkward. At the same time he knew it to be unimportant, that once they were past that, anything awkward would be forgotten.

It was love, the furnace into which everything is dropped.

He felt the absence, not necessarily of marriage, but of a tangible center in life around which things could form and find a place.

It would be better never to have met her, but what sense did that make? It had been the luckiest day of his life.

He felt the terrible emptiness of men who are ruined, who see everything collapse in a single day.

The destruction of the finest is natural, it confirms them.

He was lying with a smooth-limbed woman who had been stolen from her husband. She was now his, they were in life together.