“He began to think poignantly of Isabel: he had seldom been able to ‘see’ her more clearly than as he sat looking out of his compartment window, after reading the account of this accident. She might have been just on the other side of the glass, looking in at him--and then he thought of her as the pale figure of a woman, seen yet unseen, flying through the air beside the train, over the fields of springtime green and through the woods that were just sprouting out their little leaves. He closed his eyes and saw her as she had been long ago. He saw the brown-eyed, brown-haired, proud, gentle, laughing girl he had known when he first came to town, a boy just out of the State College. He remembered--as he had remembered ten thousand times before--the look she gave him when her brother George introduced him to her at a picnic; it was ‘like hazel starlight’ he had written her, in a poem, afterward.”                                          

Booth Tarkington  THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS