“Once she had existed, and the world had spun before her not at a distance, but within her arms, and all who had lived looked upon her, knew all which they should ever know in the expanse of everything that is good and near; here upon her skin, there within the folds of her muscle, that warmth upon her cheeks, that hidden tenderness beneath her lips, that saccharine buried within her corners—but now her body was shut up in the tropics, tucked away in her mother’s attic, and the only things she ever saw truly to be alive were the birds of paradise the servant-boy brought in his mother’s milk-glass vase and the woman who came on Sundays.”