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Kindle Notes & Highlights
A world was born around her, like a bright forest with a million shimmering leaves.
She could find Carol’s perfume like a fine thread in the stronger smell of evergreen, and she wanted to follow it, to put her arms around Carol.
Carol was like a secret spreading through her, spreading through this house, too, like a light invisible to everyone but her.
Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite. It depended on how much one let the string out—
How indifferent he was to Carol after all, Therese thought. She felt he didn’t see her, as he sometimes hadn’t seen figures in rock or cloud formations when she had tried to point them out to him.
Was life, were human relations like this always, Therese wondered. Never solid ground underfoot. Always like gravel, a little yielding, noisy so the whole world could hear, so one always listened, too, for the loud, harsh step of the intruder’s foot.
She did not want to talk. Yet she felt there were thousands of words choking her throat, and perhaps only distance, thousands of miles, could straighten them out. Perhaps it was freedom itself that choked her.
What was it to love someone, what was love exactly, and why did it end or not end? Those were the real questions, and who could answer them.
She had seen just now what she had only sensed before, that the whole world was ready to be their enemy, and suddenly what she and Carol had together seemed no longer love or anything happy but a monster between them, with each of them caught in a fist.
She was proud that Carol had the courage to do such things, to say such things, that Carol always would have the courage.
