I pulled her to me; my lips pressed to hers, my last conscious thought being that if what Lila was giving me was not, as she had cried out to me, “true, great love,” well, then life was even more abounding in beauty, joy, and happiness than I had imagined, even as she departed for Paris that very evening — here, without premeditation but not without a smile, I have created a syntactic confusion between “she” and “life” — where her parents were waiting for her.
