“It was a simple matter to choose a physique for him, for she possessed in her secret, lonely-girl’s imagination, for her nights’ pleasure, a stock of thighs, arms, torsoes, faces, hair, teeth, necks, and knees, and she knew how to assemble them so as to make of them a live man to whom she loaned a soul–which was always the same one for each of these constructions: the one she would have liked to have herself.”
