She thought often that what she missed most about her youth was not the loss of her beauty or her figure, like women usually said. She had never been all that pretty to begin with. What she missed was the capacity for love. That intense love, which she and Herbert felt for one another in the beginning, and for music and art. You couldn’t ever love that way when you were older. Listening to the old songs or thinking hard on when she first met her husband, she could conjure up memories of how it felt. But remembering was not the same as feeling it.
