i wanted her and i could n't fight it ; yet my old fantasies came back to me , those long ago visions in which i imagined myself waking her , and taking her with me through the opera houses , and the museums and the symphony halls , through the great capitals and their storehouses of all things beautiful and imperishable that men and women had made over the centuries , artifacts that transcended all evil , all wrongs , all fallibility of the individual soul .