“But Harry ... please, please understand! I understand your wandering, your hurting, almost your killing of yourself and of me ... in order to find breath. Understand mine!”
“What do you mean, Fanny?”
“I am human also. I am not ... I do not want to be that perfect emptiness you call your Christian wife. O my beloved, I am all warm for you, I am all living for you, because I too have struggled and have wandered ... in order to find breath.”
“What do you mean?”
She stood close to him. “Look at me close, my love.”
“What do you mean?” Very slowly, his pale white hands with their blue veins curled up like leaves in autumn, drying, drying: fists.
“Do you feel how I love you? Do you feel ... O you must ... how my love now, that was a little stupid girlish thing, has bloomed: how it is full of blood, full of sustaining sweetness? Do you not feel, Harry, how you have come back to a love that will feed you, that will lift you up until the end of years?”
“Yes ... I feel that. What do you mean?”
“That love is over the despair and death of our past years as a tree is over the ground.”
“Fanny ... I....”