THE times when the pain was nearest to the physical—to that of a finger crushed in a door, or a tooth under a drill —were not those in which I thought ‘He no longer loves me’ but those in which I thought ‘He will not even write to tell me that he no longer loves me.’ For weeks his silence seemed no more than his usual unreadiness as a letter writer; then, for months, the result of his absorption in his work and in the place where he was working, both of which he had described with vibrating enthusiasm.
