All I knew, really, was that she had taken away with her when she had gone something which in the past had held me together, some necessary sense of myself... For without whatever it was, I seemed poor, depleted, injured in some mysterious way; without it, there was nothing to interpose between the world and me.

She inhabited a world from which I was excluded, and she had left me in an immense empty space.

There were times when I would forget her, though they were rare, and it would be for a time as though she had never existed; and then some passing girl's inadvertent gesture, or an accidental profile, or a hat like hers, would restore her, and restore the suffering too, and I would long again, somehow, to encounter or to see her.

Your only vice is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.