Bruised again and again in the hesitant hands of almost-lovers who met her longing for “fulness of being” with only half of themselves, people whose hearts thrashed about in the self-erected cages of intellectual ambition, she at last comes to recognize that the most exalted qualities of character—those that make for “the life, the life!”—are not of the mind but of the heart and spirit: integrity, unaffected kindness, constancy of affection.
