We knew the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

I baked a pie full of rat poision. I though I could eat it, you know, without being suspicious. My nana, who is 86... [starts to break down] she really likes sweets. She had three pieces.

What I heard then was the melody of children at play. Nothing but that. And I knew that the hopelessly poignant thing was not Lolita's absence from my side, but the absence of her voice from that chorus.

Lo, plain Lo in the morning, standing four-feet-ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks... Dolly at school... Dolores on the dotted line. In my arms, she was always Lolita. Light of my life. Fire of my loins. My sin. My soul. Lo-lee-ta.

I looked and looked at her, and I knew, as clearly as I know that I will die, that I loved her more than anything I had ever seen or imagined on earth. She was only the dead-leaf echo of the nymphet from long ago -- but I loved her, this Lolita, pale and polluted and big with another man's child. She could fade and wither -- I didn't care. I would still go mad with tenderness at the mere sight of her face.

A normal man, given a group photograph of school girls and asked to point out the loveliest one, will not necessarily choose the nymphet among them.