they did not betray what he most profoundly knew.

realized the little time he had in life to read so much, to learn what he had to know.

And he would feel that he was out of time, as

felt very distant from them and very close to them.

They had forgiven themselves for the harm they had done each other, and they were rapt in a regard of what their life together might have been.

“Lust and learning,” Katherine once said. “That’s really all there is, isn’t it?” And it seemed to Stoner that that was exactly true, that that was one of the things he had learned.

“I suppose I thought I was too. Oh, how proper we seem to ourselves when we have no reason to be improper! It takes being in love to know something about yourself.

And it occurred to him at last, with the finality of knowledge, that he had never known another human being with any intimacy or trust or with the human warmth of commitment.

In his extreme youth Stoner had thought of love as an absolute state of being to which, if one were lucky, one might find access; in his maturity he had decided it was the heaven of a false religion, toward which one ought to gaze with an amused disbelief, a gently familiar contempt, and an embarrassed nostalgia. Now in his middle age he began to k