Della

In the fiction section of the New Yorker online there's this rather cute finish to a tightly written, quietly poignant short story by Anne Enright:

And it seemed so absurd to Della—the thirty years that these things mattered, out of the eighty years that made up a life, eighty or more—that she found herself laughing out loud.

“What’s the joke?” he said.

“Nothing,” she said.

“Don’t let me stop you,” he said.

“I won’t, so,” she said.

And he turned his face to her; gleeful, as if he could see her quite clearly—a woman in his kitchen who was far from being a virgin, a woman who would, no doubt, find him quite attractive, in the end.

It has always intrigued me how a carefully constructed series of sentences--in the coherence of a story, linear or not--evokes a clutch of different feelings.