The End of the Affair

There was no pursuit and no seduction. We left half the good steak on our plates and a third of the bottle of claret and came out into Maiden Lane with the same intention in both our minds. At exactly the same spot as before, by the doorway and the grill, we kissed. I said, ‘I’m in love.’
‘Me too.’

I had always been irritated by that mechanical response to her presence because it meant nothing—one cannot always welcome a woman’s presence, even if one is in love, and I believed Sarah when she told me they had never been in love.

What a dull lifeless quality this bitterness is.

When you are miserable, you envy other people’s happiness.’ It wasn’t

It wasn’t, of course, simply the onions—it was that sudden sense of an individual woman, of a frankness that was so often later to make me happy and miserable

Is it possible to fall in love over a dish of onions?

The lover had ordered steak and onions, the girl hesitated for a moment to take the onions because her husband didn’t like the smell, the lover was hurt and angry because he realized what was behind her hesitation, which brought to his mind the inevitable embrace on her return home. The scene was a success: I had wanted to convey the sense of passion through some common simple episode without any rhetoric in words or action, and it worked.

reviewers said it was the work of a craftsman: that was all that was left me of what had been a passion

War didn’t trouble those deep sea-caves, but now there was something of infinitely greater importance to me than war, than my novel—the end of love.

long as one is happy one can endure any discipline: it was unhappiness that broke down the habits of work