Explore "Tono-Bungay" by H.G. Wells on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Love, like everything else in this immense process of social disorganisation in which we live, is a thing adrift, a fruitless thing broken away from its connections. I tell of this love affair here because of its irrelevance, because it is so remarkable that it should mean nothing, and be nothing except itself. It glows in my memory like some bright casual flower starting up amidst the debris of a catastrophe. For nearly a fortnight we two met and made love together. Once more this mighty passion, that our aimless civilisation has fettered and maimed and sterilised and debased, gripped me and filled me with passionate delights and solemn joys -- that were all, you know, futile and purposeless. Once more I had the persuasion "This matters. Nothing else matters so much as this. " We were both infinitely grave in such happiness as we had. I do not remember any laughter at all between us.
Twelve days it lasted from that encounter in my chalet until our parting.