Stoner

He listened to his words fall as if from the mouth of another, and watched his father’s face, which received those words as a stone receives the repeated blows of a fist.

Her parents behaved toward each other with a distant courtesy; Edith never saw pass between them the spontaneous warmth of either anger or love. Anger was days of courteous silence, and love was a word of courteous endearment.

She was educated upon the premise that she would be protected from the gross events that life might thrust in her way, and upon the premise that she had no other duty than to be a graceful and accomplished accessory to that protection, since she belonged to a social and economic class to which protection was an almost sacred obligation.

With a touch that was so frail that he could hardly feel it, she led him beside the open coffin. He looked down. He looked until his eyes cleared, and then he started back in shock. The body that he saw seemed that of a stranger; it was shrunken and tiny, and its face was like a thin brown-paper mask, with black deep depressions where the eyes shou

For many minutes the two of them were able to talk together unselfconsciously, hiding themselves under the cover of their discourse.

He felt a distant closeness to her, and a pity for her helplessness; desire thickened in his throat so that he could not speak.

He felt a distant pity and reluctant friendship and familiar respect; and he felt also a weary sadness, for he knew that no longer could the sight of her bring upon him the agony of desire that he had once known, and knew that he would never again be moved as he had once been moved by her presence. The sadness lessened, and he covered her gently, t

They had come to that point in their life together when they seldom spoke of themselves or each other, lest the delicate balance that made their living together possible be broken. So it was only after long hesitation and deliberation about consequences that Stoner finally asked her if anything was wrong.

In his forty-third year William Stoner learned what others, much younger, had learned before him: that the person one loves at first is not the person one loves at last, and that love is not an end but a process through which one person attempts to know another.