Of Human Bondage

p. 132

Philip Carey has fallen in love. “He had thought of love as a rapture which seized one so that all the world seemed spring-like, he had looked forward to an ecstatic happiness; but this was not happiness; it was a hunger of the soul, it was a painful yearning, it was a bitter anguish, he had never known before. He tried to think when it had first come to him. He did not know. He only remembered that each time he had gone into the shop, after the first two or three times, it had been with a little feeling in the heart that was pain; and he remembered that when she spoke to him he felt curiously breathless. When she left it was a wretchedness, and when she came to him again it was despair. . . . . He wondered how he was going to endure that ceaseless aching of his soul.”