“For two years he had lain beside Irene feeling her disease growing like a child of theirs. He had stayed awake in the shadow of her silence, marvelling at the stark untouchable beauty of her stoicism. In the dark her pain had seemed an incandescence. Toward the end, in the intervals when the haze of painkillers lifted, she spoke to him as she never had, lightly, as to another child whom she did not know well but with whom she had been fated to spend a long afternoon. “I think they might have been just kidding us,” she confided one time. “Suppose you don’t get to take a trip up to Heaven?” Or again, “I knew I was boring to you, but I didn’t know how else to be.” In her puzzlement at his tears she would touch his hair, not quite daring to touch his face.”