It was his own love that thrust her from him and made her seem impossible for him.

Love itself denied him the one thing that it desired.
And then, one day, without warning, the gulf between them was bridged for a moment, and thereafter, though the gulf remained, it was ever narrower.
They had been eating cherries--great, luscious, black cherries with a juice of the color of dark wine.

And later, as she read aloud to him from "The Princess," he chanced to notice the stain of the cherries on her lips.

For the moment her divinity was shattered.

She was clay, after all, mere clay, subject to the common law of clay as his clay was subject, or anybody's clay.