On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of what was the original food. She would put handfuls of earth in her pockets, and ate them in small bits without being seen, with a confused feeling of pleasure and rage, as she instructed her girl friends in the most difficult needlepoint and spoke about other men, who did not deserve the sacrifice of having one eat the whitewash on the walls because of them. The handfuls of earth made the only man who deserved that show of degradation less remote and more certain, as if the ground that he walked on with his fine patent leather boots in another part of the world were transmitting to her the weight and the temperature of his blood in a mineral savor that left a harsh aftertaste in her mouth and a sediment of peace in her heart.

a certain bohemian, good-witch sort of charm

But she makes hungry
Where she most satisfies...

She sounds the way bananas taste.

"Her presence brought memories of such things as Bourbon roses, rubies, and tropical midnights; her moods recalled lotus-eaters and the march in "Athalie"; her motions, the ebb and flow of the sea; her voice, the viola."

Mary seemed to have taken a perverse pleasure in seeing how best she could alternate undercooking and overcooking.

He could smell her crackling white apron and the faint flavour of toast that always hung about her so deliciously.

"Her cuisine is limited but she has as good an idea of breakfast as a Scotchwoman."

<i>[Sherlock Holmes, on Mrs. Hudson's cooking.]</i>

One wanted, she thought, dipping her brush deliberately, to be on a level with ordinary experience, to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, It's a miracle, it's an ecstasy.

She’s adventurous, but knows how to relax; outgoing, but knows how to be cozy and intimate; sexual, but knows how to be sweet.

She tasted for the first time honey-sweet and dangerous happiness: dangerous because, as she before long began to learn, precarious.

She had acquired some of his gypsy ways, some of his nonchalance, his bohemian indiscipline. She had swung with him into the disorders of strewn clothes, spilled cigarette ashes, slipping into bed all dressed, falling asleep thus, indolence, timelessness...A region of chaos and moonlight. She liked it there.

I think she ate a salad and some soup.
And loneliness.
She ate that, too.

Too old to dream of perfection, perhaps, she had instead discovered a certain delicious appeal in flaws.