But by now anything was better than hope.
We are all potentially demons to each other, but some close relationships are saved from this fate.
Christ, I loathe women. But I can't get going on the other tack either. And you needn't blush and look coy, I never fancied you. I know what you got up to with Fritzie Eitel! No—but I'd have had old Wilfred if he'd asked me. What did old Wilfred do for sex? No one ever knew. Perhaps he didn't have any, and if so good on him.
I have felt more passion with less comfort elsewhere: the mysterious deep half-blind preferences of human beings for each other, the quick probing tentacles that seek in the dark, why one inexplicably and yet certainly loves A and is indifferent to B.
There is a deep foundation of my being which knows not of time and change and is still and ever with Hartley, in that good place where we once were.