When, some time after their marriage, Jack told her that he loved eternally, that they would never be parted, that she was not to worry, and that he had taken a mistress, Franca thought she would die of grief. Her life seemed to be at an end. She saw now the difference between the joy that expected nothing and the joy that presumed to have everything. In a special way, she wept over a change, which she tried to resist but could not, in her estimate of her husband. Iris Murdoch, in The message to the planet, ed. Vintage Classics.