The Touchstone

Only the fact that we are unaware how well our nearest know us enables us to live with them.Love is the most impregnable refuge of self-esteem, and we hate the eye that reaches to ournakedness. If Glennard did not hate his wife it was slowly, sufferingly, that there was born in himthat profounder passion which made his earlier feeling seem a mere commotion of the blood. Hewas like a child coming back to the sense of an enveloping presence: her nearness was a breaston which he leaned.