fiefoe

It was good to be able to care so much about work. It must be something like the way men feel, Caroline thought, except that men have to worry so much about the money.
Why was it always like this, that one looked so much prettier when one was out with a boy who meant nothing?
When he stood close to her and she realized it meant more than that to him she was somehow rather shocked. It was as if one were to kiss one's favorite uncle and suddenly find him panting.
If she had loved him, how happy she would have been that he cared if she was chilly or not!
It's hell to be a woman, Gregg thought; to want so much love, to feel like only half a person, to need so much. What was it Plato had said? A man and a woman are each only half a person until they unite. Why hadn't he made that clearer to the men?

She was convinced that he loved her. And still, they had reached a plateau on which she suffered and he seemed quite content.
It was useless to try to estimate his thoughts. He was too separate from her, his life was a world of his own. And at that moment her own life and privacy had had for her vanished completely.
"We have to see each other," she said. "We have to! I'll leave you alone, I promise."
She was what she was, and she had made of their relationship the tense and teetering thing it was. She knew it, and she was powerless to do anything about it.
"Because you need someone who will love you for these things and be warmed by them, not someone who finds them harder and harder to forgive."

"The Best of Everything"