Angle of Repose Again

I posted here a short passage from Wallace Stegner's Angle of Repose, his 1971 Pulitzer Prize winning 
novel. Now that I've finished I'll post another:

"What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she [Ellen Ward] asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life ...

In the next paragraph Stegner's narrator give his answer:

There must be some other possibility than death or lifelong penance, said the Ellen Ward of my dream, that woman [ex-wife] I hate and fear. I am sure she meant some meeting, some intersection of lines; and some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.

A fine book that I highly recommend.