The smell of her hair, the taste of her mouth, the feeling of her skin seemed to have got inside him, or into the air all round him. She had become a physical necessity.

[...] and yet the woman's existence, her straining to live, came touching him like naked skin.

But, drawn to her at that moment, he felt a quiet like the voice of the rain flow over him. He knew well enough that for her it was in fact no waste of effort, but somehow the final determination that it was had the effect of distilling and purifying the woman's existence.

He could never get used to her, she was fresh every time, she was a casketful of secrets. Any moment now she would open herself up, reveal to him the essential thing, the hidden thing at the core of her life, or of her life, or of his life — the thing he was longing to know. The thing he'd always wanted.

Suddenly he was inside the radius of her perfume and kissing her breathlessly.

But in the night he woke and held her tight as though she were all of life and it was being taken from him. He held her feeling she was all of life there was and it was true.

But over time, and many visits, it seemed that she was all that the King wanted. Her life began to seem like a dream: light, ethereal, and breathtaking. The King’s people embraced her.

Her awareness of her body was inseparable from her memory of his embrace.

And yet he had loved her. A Bookish girl heedless of her beauty, unconscious of her effect. She'd been prepared to live her life alone but from the moment he'd known her he'd needed her.

He held her as though she was a gift. Given to him in love. Something still and small. Unbearably precious.

He needed her so badly, to reassure himself of his
own existence, that he never comprehended the desperation in her dazzling, permanent smile, the terror in the brightness with which she faced the world, or the reasons why she hid when she couldn't manage to beam... every moment she
spent in the world was full of panic, so she smiled and smiled and maybe once a week she locked the door and shook and felt like a husk, like an empty peanut-shell, a monkey without a nut.

He drenched himself in a scent so thick that it was almost visible

There, on that hill, his wife could be seen. She lay like a sleeping boulder, the air and toxins wearing away at her, her arms curled under her head.

— his indescribable little air of knowing nothing in the world but love.