Adultery and vampirism (the latter broadly understood as to include such works as Middlemarch and Great Expectations) form the themes, or the kernels in the themes, of a great number of novels, and many among the greatest. There is a common idea in these of concealment, and the powers of concealment, its price, and what needs and is worthy of concealing. A new romantic connection, the event of such a connection, numbs out the emotional pattern of the prior relationship but in an odd way. The latter can still function but as disconnected, as going on by its own momentum but now irrelevant to, or merely a threat to be evaded by, the new world your heart has found itself in and which fills it completely. There is an adulterous version of the topos of lovers creating their own private world, shutting out the common world, but in this variant they leave behind phantoms of themselves which continue to appear and to fill their functions in that common world. It is an example of a pattern of feelings and functions being systematically detached from its roots in reality but still able to continue by drawing its energy from habit and other secondary sources, an energy of the simulacrum being itself no more than a simulacrum of energy. One of these worlds is that of life and the other of after-life, but it is not entirely certain which is which (cf. Tristan). This is displacement into fictionality, as is the peculiar poignancy of the lovers' fragile floating world, which is also patently fictional. The point being that novelism, no matter that it often pretends to be an innocent expression of the youthful relish for adventure and exploration, draws on undercurrents of imaginative energy of unexpected intensity and intent.