I couldn't deny some satisfaction in my rival, my disruptor, dispensing of himself so conveniently. But Rose's account had softened me, a little, just a little, towards Kevin Howard. A young man, clever, strangely pretty, inexperienced, falls crazily in love. He sees, as in a vision, the bright terminus beyond which his loneliness need not proceed. Rose's tender arms were around him last night. This is where their lovemaking has brought them, and he knows she'll understand. He blurts it out, three children so close in age that they and their toys are constant happy playmates. He is the willing prisoner of an ecstatic solipsism. But Rose brings ruin with her alien antipathies and withdraws her love. Banishment! He takes his sorrow along the airless corridor to the lift that will carry him down into an indifferent world.

— What We Can Know by Ian McEwan (Page 159)