The appeal of her sensuality was answered by mine, then, and often later.

But the pleasure constantly restored, which impelled me towards her, always ended in dismal enlightenments.
She remained a capricious and baffling egotist, and when I came away from her house across the dark suburb among a host of beings vanishing, like myself, I only brought away the memory of her nervous and irritating laugh, and that new wrinkle which clung to her mouth like an implement.
Then younger desires destroyed the old, and gallant adventures begot one another.

It is all over with this one and that one whom I adored.
When I see them again, I wonder that I can say, at one and the same time, of a being who has not changed, "How I loved her!" and, "How I have ceased to love her!" All the while performing as a duty my daily task, all the while taking suitable precautions so that Marie may not know and may not suffer, I am looking for the happiness which lives.

And truly, when I have a sense of some new assent wavering and making ready, or when I am on the way to a first rendezvous, I feel myself gloriously uplifted, and equal to everything! This fills my life.

Desire wears the brain as much as thought wears it.