You die at heart from a withdrawal of love.
This was the old, the unmistakable state of being in love which she had imagined she would never experience again.
There was absolutely nothing that she could do with this huge emotion which she had so suddenly discovered in herself.
Perhaps he would achieve some sort of peace, the peace of an elderly man, a peace of cosy retirement without angels. Without women too, he thought.
How strangely it excites people to see their dogs swimming!
But with her I would have been faithful, with her my whole life would have been different, less rootless, less empty.
But she felt that she had to see him or she would die.
For years he had been incapable of tears.
These young people have got to suffer, we can’t save them from it –.
For me, nothing can ever be well again.
If only there were not these vain ghostly hopes, these sudden inane shadows of possibilities, these unfulfilled conditionals of hopeless desire.
She was her death now, that death which she had so much striven to emulate in life, which she had studied and practised and loved. She had succeeded, and death and she had converged into a single point. Who knew if that was victory or defeat? His last vision was of the white veil that hid her now. After all, and at last, she had become utterly private.
She stood there awkwardly, incapable of further theatre.
On this diet of expectation, he had fairly frenzied himself by the time he arrived.
So art becomes not communication but mystification.
Mary thought suddenly, this is an abomination, sitting here and having this conventional conversation when I feel so desperate and deprived and torn inside. She thought, is there nothing I can do about it?
I am out of the saga, he thought. He had a heavy sense of being left in total isolation; everyone had withdrawn from him and the person who could most have helped him was pre-empted by another.
Only the curve of her nostril and the curve of her mouth hinted, with a Jewish strength, a possible Jewish refinement.
Even now I shake and tremble as I write. Memory is too weak a name for this terrible evocation. Oh Hartley, Hartley, how timeless, how absolute love is. My love for you is unaware that I am old and you perhaps are dead.
I told you I was going to retire from the world. That’s still on. You remember that.