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131 sort of terror the psychic effects it wrought in me..... My hopes went no further than these. And, as I say, I won them. As it kindly happened, our tastes, our interests in arts and letters, our temperaments, the fact that he came to my city with few acquaintances in it and was not a man who readily seeks them... the chance that he lived almost in the same house with me... such circumstances favored me immediately. But I did not deceive myself once, either as to what was the measure or the kind of my emotion for him, any more than about what (if stretched to its uttermost) would be his sentiment for me, for any man. He could not love a man so. He would love... passionately, and to the completing of his sexual nature... only a woman. He was the normal, I the abnormal. In that, alone, he failed to meet all that was I:

"'O, the little more, and how much it is! And the little less.. and what worlds away!'"

"Did I keep my secret perfectly from him? Perfectly, Imre! You will soon see that clearly.