Often he caught himself wishing that everything had come out all right in the end and that Constance really was his private secretary.
Every moment with her seemed now to pass so quickly that he would willingly have smashed all the clocks and destroyed all the calendars.
Association with other women had been tame beside his new friendship with her.

She had suffered, felt, lived.

She fascinated him, as often over the books they would stop to talk, talk of things the most irrelevant, yet to him the most interesting, until she would bring him back inevitably to the point of their work and start him again with a new power and incentive toward the purpose she had in mind.
To Constance he seemed to fill a blank spot in her empty life.

If she had been bitter toward the world for what had happened to her, the pleasure of helping another to beat that harsh world seemed an unspeakably sweet compensation.
At last even Constance herself began to realize it.

It was not, after all, merely the bitterness toward society, that lured her on.