Stoner

Her moral training, both at the schools she attended and at home, was negative in nature, prohibitive in intent, and almost entirely sexual. The sexuality, however, was indirect and unacknowledged; therefore it suffused every other part of her education, which received most of its energy from that recessive and unspoken moral force. She learned tha

Then he smiled fondly, as if at a memory; it occurred to him that he was nearly sixty years old and that he ought to be beyond the force of such passion, of such love. But he was not beyond it, he knew, and would never be. Beneath the numbness, the indifference, the removal, it was there, intense and steady; it had always been there. In his youth h

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.

He put his hand upon her and felt beneath the thin cloth of her nightgown the flesh he had longed for. He moved his hand upon her; she did not stir; her frown deepened. Again he spoke, saying her name to silence; then he moved his body upon her, gentle in his clumsiness. When he touched the softness of her thighs she turned her head sharply away an

They returned to Columbia two days earlier than they had planned; restless and strained by their isolation, it was as if they walked together in a prison.

“It’s very small,” Katherine Driscoll said, stooping to pick up one of the books on the floor, “but I don’t need much room.”

He thought of what he would have to tell his parents, and for the first time realized the finality of his decision, and almost wished that he could recall it. He felt his inadequacy to the goal he had so recklessly chosen and felt the attraction of the world he had abandoned. He grieved for his own loss and for that of his parents, and even in his

She had meant to shock them both by her sudden presence and by her changed appearance; but when William looked up at her, and she saw the surprise in his eyes, she knew at once that the real change had come over him, and that it was so deep that the effect of her appearance was lost; and she thought to herself, a little distantly and yet with some

Stoner shook his head, almost in admiration. “My God,” he said. “How you make it sound! Sure, everything you say is a fact, but none of it is true. Not the way you say it.”