That art gives charm to terrible things is perhaps its glory, perhaps its curse. Art is a doom.

How could it be that I had actually kissed her cheek without enveloping her, without becoming her? How could I at that moment have refrained from kneeling at her feet and howling?

It might be most dramatically effective to begin the tale at the moment when Arnold Baffin rang me up and said, "Bradley, could you come round here please, I think I have just killed my wife.

Or did I know by intuition that wonderful and terrible things were really imminent at last, trembling into being just behind the curtain of the future?

But there can be intuitions even here of a more sublime agony.