“Remember…” she began.

“What?”

“About my love.”

“Yes.”

“No one will ever love you so much.”

“No, I know,” he said with slight impatience, as if this were irrelevant. After a moment he added: “Yes. It has been worth it.” His tone was historic, she thought, like a farewell.

She put the telephone down and lay back on the pillow. The lengthening, reddish light was already the light of a very hot day, but she shivered and drew the sheet up to her shoulders, and could not get warm. I suppose I will realize it quite soon now, she thought with detachment. He said: “It has been worth it.” What has it been worth? What is to happen to me? What am I to suffer? Calamity has a generalizing effect, and as yet she could foresee her suffering only in a monumental way and not in its inexorable, annihilating detail. She considered her resources, ranging her ideas, her secrets carefully against the unapprehended future. But ideas don’t supplant feelings, she thought; rather, they prepare us for, sustain us in our feelings. If I understand why I am to be hurt, then does that really mean that it will hurt me less? I know that I risked—invited—this, wounded May. I have disturbed the balance. There is balance in life, but not fairness. The seasons, the universe give an impression of concord, but it is order, not harmony; consistency, not sympathy. We suffer because our demands are unreasonable or disorderly. But if reason is inescapable, so is humanity. We are human beings, not rational ones.

She thought of Clem with a slight surprise, her predicament now seeming a thing itself, scarcely connected with him. If she instinctively wished for deliverance, it was for deliverance of an unfamiliar and pragmatic nature—much as a sailor on a sinking ship might hope to see the Coast Guard rather than his wife and children. Clem cannot help me, she thought; we are not contending with the same elements. He was amusing himself with me, really. He did not want to be inconvenienced in this way; the inconvenience will be the greatest of his burdens. (She felt this almost with gratitude, relieved of the additional weight of Clem’s grief.) They will make it up. They will be very solemn with each other, and May will use words like “relationship,” and they will make it up. For a while they will hold each other’s hands in public, and Clem will come home from the office on time. Once she has established her advantage, May will behave admirably toward me—she will be able to watch herself behaving admirably, like a person in a play. She will expect me to behave admirably back at her, but I have loved him too much for that. Or am at too great a disadvantage. Perhaps they will send me off somewhere, for a trip. (She even considered this possibility with a certain interest, wondering where she might go and what clothes she would need.) And Clem will manage to persuade himself that that is the best possible thing, that nothing could be better for me at this moment than to go ten thousand miles and be alone. He may miss me after a while, in the one particular way, but as long as he doesn’t have to see me he will be all right. She dwelt for a moment, still painlessly—almost, in fact, with a smile—on Clem’s resilience. Her eyes traveled listlessly around the room. I have nothing of his, she thought, nothing he gave me—not even a photograph, and he will look different now that he has stopped loving me. I couldn’t prove, if I had to, that he ever existed for me—it’s like that awful story about the walled-up hotel room in Paris. I shan’t be able to say his name to anyone, not even to say that I miss him. It is just as he once said, no one will be able to sympathize with what I’ve lost—but that sounds like a funeral: “Profound sympathy in your recent loss…” In any case, even if they knew about it, people wouldn’t sympathize. With a thing like this, they don’t sympathize unless you die. And that would be exceptional.