She let him put his head on her breast, withdrawing her hand so that she could take him in her arms. She leaned back on the sofa, slightly breathless from his weight and from the pressure of his head, which was quite hard. In spite of the discrepancy in their ages, she felt protective—almost dispassionate—as she held him and moved her hand consolingly up and down his shuddering spine. She also regarded him with a certain amount of vulgar curiosity—she had never seen a man weep before, and was young enough to consider it a monument in her experience. In addition, she was unable to rid herself of the notion that he wept for what he was about to say. Relieved of speculation, she found herself invested, instead, with the kind of momentary self-possession that is summoned up in a doctor’s waiting room. She breathed, through the salt smell of his hair, the steam of the coffee and even regretted that her cup had to get cold. Her eyes, uptilted by her attitude, rested on the pale-green wall opposite her. She reflected that in love one can only win by cheating and that the skill is to cheat first. (Having coveted neither the advantage nor the skill, however, she had no justification for disputing—as she did—the defeat that confronted her.)

He raised his head and shifted his position so that he too leaned back on the sofa, although his shoulder still pressed on hers. He held her right hand in his own, and with his left felt for his handkerchief and blew his nose. He closed his eyes, frowning, and she could see that he was studying how to begin. She tightened her clasp on his hand and said kindly, almost politely: “Don’t worry. Just tell me.”

He opened his eyes and sat up a little. “How good you are,” he said.

This struck her as the sort of compliment one pays to a child, to encourage its behavior in the desired direction. It comforted her not at all that her judgment of him should remain thus pitilessly detached—that she saw him, perhaps, more clearly and with less admiration than ever before. The insight was useless to her, trapped as she was in the circumstance of love. She knew that sitting there with her hands clasped about his and her eyes on his face she represented, accurately, a spectacle of abject appeal. In any case, it was a habit of hers—possibly through the fear of loss—to appear most propitiating when she most condemned.

“Nothing has been decided,” he said, putting away his handkerchief with a faint air of getting down to business. “I can only tell you what we feel about it.”

At the word “we,” she lowered her eyes and kept them fastened to the design of interlocking fingers in her lap. Aware of having somehow blundered, he had already lost the place in his text; it was asking too much of her that she should prompt him.