Then the angry joke would return again and again, until at last they let it stay and did not laugh at it, but thought it over.

Such things always happened because some one wanted, or did not want, something very much, something it drove them mad to think of being forced to live without, or with.

Men who hated a woman and could not rid themselves of her, who hated the sight of her face, her eyes, her hair, the sound of her voice and step, and were rendered insane by her nearness and the thought that they never could be free from any of these things, had before now, commonplace or comparatively agreeable men, by degrees reached the point where a knife or a shot or a heavy blow seemed not only possible but inevitable.
People who had been ill-treated, people who had faced horrors through want and desire, had reached the moment in which they took by force what Fate would not grant them.

Her brain so whirled that she wondered if she was not a little delirious as she sat in the stillness thinking such strange things.
For weeks she had been living under a strain so intense that her feelings had seemed to cease to have any connection with what was normal.
She had known too much; and yet she had been certain of nothing at all.
But she and Alec were like the people who began with a bad joke, and then were driven and driven.

It was impossible not to think of what might come, and of what might be lost for ever.