Robin felt a warmth that had nothing to do with the fire, which was crackling away within a deep tiled recess. Edwin's wry, professorial humour was something that Robin didn't think many people were allowed to see.

Robin felt foolish enough that he contemplated upsetting the teapot as a diversion.

You look like a Turner painting and I want to learn your textures with my fingertips. You are the most fascinating thing in this beautiful house. I'd like to introduce my fists to whoever taught you to stop talking about the things that interest you.

A chauffeur was not needed. Robin referred vaguely to friends of his who owned motorcars and had taught him the knack of it in Hyde Park—"Though the speed limit's only ten miles to the hour, in the Park. And it's twice that in the country! This should be a lark."
Edwin, who wished Robin had betrayed this boyish and limb-threatening enthusiasm before they'd pulled out onto the road proper, pulled his hat more firmly down onto his head and fiddled with his cradling string, trying to remember if he'd ever read anything about how to unbreak a broken skull.

Robin held Edwin in the cradle of his fingers like a spell that would snap into nothing unless handled with care.

It was the way he felt watching Edwin read; it was the feeling he had every time his eyes sought Edwin in a room and landed on any angle of the man's face, any movement of those delicate fingers:  There you are. I've been waiting for you.

Robin said, very quiet, "Tell me to stay, stay for you, and I will."

Always, with Edwin, that surprise. The wariness. The vivid expectation of abandonment; the bone-deep resignation to the fact that he would lose the things he wanted, or else never deserved them in the first place.

Robin wanted to make a leather-bound book of his belief and hand it to Edwin, make him read it over and over until Edwin could look in a mirror and see something of what Robin saw.

In the jubilant flare of the candlelight he was the loveliest thing Robin had ever seen.