“But she had to know words. She had to know everything.”

“What she did know, unfortunately, was that she had to reconsider everything she'd ever willed herself to believe about her husband.”

“She regretted the explanation immediately, but that was because she always regretted everything. And then, after the regret had flared and burned out, she didn't care. He should know, she thought. She wanted him to know. She felt something for somebody, and she'd told him.”

“She felt, as she felt so often with Murphy, spattered with words that went dead as soon as they sounded; each word obliterated, before it had time to make sense, by the word that came next; so that in the end she did not know what had been said. It was like difficult music heard for the first time.”

“But she had felt since childhod that her life would n ot be ordinary. A moment would come- she would know it when she saw it- and everything would change.”

“You had to know someone very well to make them laugh like that. She had loved him for such a long time, she thought. How was it that she did not know him at all?”