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.

After a pause, he said abruptly: “I think I told you I no longer loved my wife.”

“Yes,” she said.

“I only said that once, didn’t I?”

“Several times,” she answered, unaccommodatingly.

“Several times, then,” he agreed, with a touch of impatience. “In any case—I see now that I shouldn’t have said that. I mean, that it wasn’t true.”

She thought that the digressions in the minds of men were endless. How many disguises were assumed before they could face themselves. How many justifications made in order that they might simply please themselves. How dangerous they were in their self-righteousness—infinitely more dangerous than women, who could never persuade themselves to the same degree of the nobility of their actions.

“What are you thinking about?” he asked her.

“Men,” she said absently.

Taken aback by the plural, he stopped to assemble his thoughts once more. She was not being very encouraging, lowering her eyes and offering him monosyllables in this way. But there was no reason why she should encourage him, and he reminded himself of that; he was nothing if not fair.

“Why did you say it, then?” She looked up briefly. “If it wasn’t true?”

He said slowly: “I thought it was true when I said it. I’m trying to say that I don’t feel quite the same—I mean, not as I did.”

She was silent, watching her fingers uncurling from his and the tiny white dots on her blue dress waver with the trembling of her knee. The words seemed so loud that she thought their echo could diminish only over a lifetime, would go on sounding within her forever: “Not as I did.” “Not as I did.”

“I would always care about you,” he went on, now anxious to be understood, as it were, once and for all. “But it can’t be as it was.… I’d like to think we can go on being fond of one another, that you can think of me as someone who…” He paused for a moment and then continued, unconscious of irony, “who showed you what love is.” He withdrew his hand from her slackened grasp and lifted her chin so that she looked at him. “Darling, please. Please try to understand.”

“I do understand, I do really,” she said earnestly—almost in a tone of reassurance. “It’s only that I cannot bear it.”