I pitied the child.

When I played with him, I felt my fingers sink into the flesh of his limbs as into damp clay.

I took him because my aunt offered him to me, and because I never intended to place any restraint on my actions on his account.
"I found my husband just the same little suffering boy whose bed I had shared when I was six years old.

He was just as frail, just as plaintive, and he still had that insipid odour of a sick child that had been so repugnant to me previously.

I am relating all this so that you may not be jealous.