You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

Sometimes I get so immersed in my own company, if I unexpectedly run into someone I know, it's a bit of a shock and takes me a while to adjust.

It never occurred to me that our lives, until then so closely interwoven, could unravel and separate over a thing like that. But the fact was, I suppose, there were powerful tides tugging us apart by then, and it only needed something like that to finish the task. If we'd understood that back then-who knows?-maybe we'd have kept a tighter hold of one another.

You say you’re sure? Sure that you’re in love? How can you know it? You think love is so simple?

It had never occurred to me that our lives, which had been so closely interwoven, could unravel with such speed.

I do not think I responded immediately, for it took me a moment or two to fully digest these words of Miss Kenton. Moreover, as you might appreciate, their implications were such as to provoke a certain degree of sorrow within me. Indeed- why should I not admit it? - at that moment, my heart was breaking.

Many of our deepest motives come, not from an adult logic of how things work in the world, but out of something that is frozen from childhood.