DR. FAUSTUS - Chapter XXXII

""What is suffering, what fear and humiliating danger," said she, "in comparison with the one sweet, indispensable triumph, without which one would not live: to hold to its better self that frivolous, evasive, worldly, torturing, irresponsible charmingness, which yet has true human value; to drive its flippancy to serious feeling, to possess the elusive, and at last, at last, not only once but for confirmation and reassurance never often enough, to see it in the state that suits its worth, the state of devotion, of deep suspiring passion!"
I do not say the woman used exactly these words, but she expressed herself in very like ones. She was well read, accustomed to articulate her inner life in speech; as a girl she had even attempted verse. What she said had a cultured precision and something of the boldness that always arises when language tries seriously to achieve feeling and life, to make them first truly live, to exhaust them in it. This is no everyday effort, but a product of emotion, and in so far feeling and mind are related, but also in so far gets its thrilling effect..... And always there was this curious equation of worthiness with sensual passion, this fixed and strangely drunken idea that inward worthiness could only fulfill itself, in fleshly desire, which obviously something of like value with "worth"; that it was at once the highest and the most indispensable happiness to keep them together. I cannot describe the glowing, albeit melancholy and insecure, unsatisfied notes in her voice as she spoke of this mixture of the two conceptions "worth" and "desire"; how much desire appeared as the profoundly serious element, sternly opposed to the hated "society" one, "society" where true worth in play and coquetry betrayed itself; which was the inhuman, treacherous element of its exterior surface amiability; and which one must take from it, tear from it, to have it alone, utterly alone, alone in the most final sense of the word. The disciplining of lovableness till it become love: that was what it amounted to; but at the same time there was more abstruse matter, about something wherein thought and sense mystically melted into one; the idea that the contradiction between the frivolity of society and the melancholy untrustworthiness of life in general was resolved in his embrace, the suffering it caused most sweetly avenged."