past the need of words

"What he knew, what he had discovered tonight, was that his recaptured love of existence had not been given back to him by the return of his desire for her-but that the desire had returned after he had regained his world, the love, the value and the sense of his world-and that the desire was not an answer to her body, but a celebration of himself and of his will to live.

He did not know it, he did not think of it, he was past the need of words, but in the moment when he felt the response of her body to his, he also felt the unadmitted knowledge that that which he had called her depravity was her highest virtue--this capacity of hers to feel the joy of being, as he felt it."