Men she knew'? - she had conceded vaguely to herself that all men who had ever been in love with her were her friends.

smoking had come to be an important punctuation mark in the long sentence of a day on the road.

No such thing as a man willing to be honest - that would be like a blind man willing to see.

The afternoon had made them tranquil for a while, as if to give them a deep memory for the long parting the next day promised.

He must have felt that he had lost the old warm world, paid a high price for living too long with a single dream. He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about...like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.

in crowded rooms they would form words with their lips for each other's eyes

Eighteen might look at thirty-four through a rising mist of adolescence, but twenty-two would see thirty-eight with discerning clarity.