After you married, Crispin, she said, my heart was broken. I will not deny it. But I did not slip into a sort of suspended life that would be forever gray and meaningless if you did not somehow come back to me. I put back the pieces of my heart and kept on living. I am not the woman I was when I was in love with you and expecting to marry you. I am not the woman I was when I heard that you were married. I am the woman I have become in the five years since then, and she is a totally different person. I like her. I wish to continue living her life.

I'm terrified that I will never be able to put him from my mind. I don't love him but I'm afraid that he will make it impossible for me ever to love anyone else.

Did everyone make the most ghastly blunders at regularly intervals through their life and live to regret them ever afterward? Was everyone's life filled with confusing and contradictory mix of guilt and innocence, hatred and love, concern and unconcern, and any number of other pairings of polar opposites? Or were most people one thing or the other - good or bad, cheerful or crotchety, generous or miserly, and so on.

I am not sure what lonliness is," she said. "If it is not literally being solitary, is it the fear of solitude, of being alone with oneself? I feel no such fear. I like being alone." "What do you fear then?" he asked her. She glanced briefly at him and smiled, a fragile expression that spoke for itself even before she found words. "Never finding myself again.

A sunrise or sunset can be ablaze with brilliance and arouse all the passion, all the yearning, in the soul of the beholder.

But a mother-son relationship is not a coequal one, is it? He is lonely with only you just as you are lonely with only him.

This time her heart would not break, even though it would hurt and hurt for a long time to come. Perhaps for the rest of her life. But it would not break. She had the strength to go on alone.