Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.

And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.

Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?

In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune's Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire.

Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature.

I loved him," Muire said. "We were in love." As if that were enough.

That I have no right to be jealous is irrelevant. It is a human passion: the sick, white underbelly of love.