“Further, Dr. Gold said with a straight face, the pill at optimum dosage could have the side effect of impotence. Until that moment, although I'd had some trouble with his personality, I had not thought him totally lacking in perspicacity; now I was not all sure. Putting myself in Dr. Gold's shoes, I wondered if he seriously thought that this juiceless and ravaged semi-invalid with the shuffle and the ancient wheeze woke up each morning from his Halcion sleep eager for carnal fun.”

“The Doc. Virginia and Simon had told me that Dr. Dale was my doctor. I have a fuzzy recollection of walking up to some doctor-looking person and being totally absorbed by his gold tie clip. I suspected it was the button to end the world so I didn't touch it. I'm pretty sure it was Dr. Dale. I don't know who else would be so tasteless as to walk around a mental hospital wearing the button to end the world.”

“But first, he knew he had to apologize for hurting Dr. Larch’s feelings – it had all just slipped out of him, and it made him almost cry to think that he had cause Dr. Larch any suffering. He went straight across the hall to the dispensary, where he could see what he thought were Dr. Larch’s feet extending off the foot of the dispensary bed; the dispensary medicine cabinets blocked the rest of the bed from view. He spoke to Dr. Larch’s feet, which to Homer’s surprise were larger than he remembered them; he was also surprised that Dr. Larch – a neat man – had left his shows on and that his shoes were muddy.‘Doctor Larch?’ Homer said. ‘I’m sorry.’ When there was no response, Homer thought crossly to himself that Dr. Larch was under an unusually ill-timed ether sedation.‘I’m sorry, and I love you,’ Homer added, a little louder. He held his breath, listening for Larch’s breathing, which he couldn’t hear; alarmed, he stepped around the cabinets and saw the lifeless stationmaster stretched out on Larch’s bed. It did not occur to Homer that this had been the first time someone had said ‘I love you’ to the stationmaster.”

“I woke at dawn every morning to his touch, the delight of his warmth and the heady smell of his skin. I had never before lain with a man who had loved me completely, for myself, and it was a dizzy experience. I had never lain with a man whose touch I adored without any need to hide my adoration, or exaggerate it, or adjust it at all. I simply loved him as if he were my one and only lover, and he loved me too with the same simplicty of appetite and disire which made me wonder what I thought I had been doing all those years when I had been dealing in the false coin of vanity and lust. I had not known then that all along there had been this other currency of pure gold.”

“He should have no further trouble from her, he thought in satisfaction. Surely by now she knew his dominance over her. She would submit as easily in all matters as she had in this one.He frowned then. She had submitted, hadn´t she?”

“One morning at the end of the two years, as I was writing a letter to his dictation, he came and bent over me, and said--"Jane, have you a glittering ornament round your neck?" I had a gold watch-chain: I answered "Yes." "And have you a pale blue dress on?I had. He informed me then, that for some time he had fancied the obscurity clouding one eye was becoming less dense; and that now he was sure of it.”