He withdrew his hand and leaned forward with a little sigh, his elbows on his knees. Having been compelled to look at him, she now could not stop doing so. When he turned back to her, he was unnerved by that intent, expectant stare. Spreading one of his palms upward on his knee in an apparent appeal to common sense, he met her eyes and said, reasonably: “My dear, we have to come to terms with this.”

“Yes, to terms,” she said. “But whose terms—isn’t that the point?”

“Don’t.” Bending forward again, he took a sip of his cold coffee. “I hate to hear you talk like that.” He did not know how to show her that she was simply adding, uselessly, to an already difficult situation. After a silence, he asked: “Do you have anything to drink?”

She got up and put the cups and saucers back on the tray: “Is Scotch all right?” She went into the kitchen, and in a few moments reappeared carrying a bottle and a glass full of ice. He saw that her hand shook as she set the glass on the table.

“You mustn’t exaggerate the importance of this,” he told her.

She let him take the bottle from her and fill the glass. “But it does seem rather important,” she answered, apologetically. She sat down again and watched him drink, so obviously awaiting his next pronouncement that he took an extra sip of whisky to gain time.

“Yes,” he went on. “It seems—is—dreadful, if you like. But darling, I mean that you have everything ahead of you. At your age, this isn’t a—matter of life and death.”

She thought that it would, in fact, be easier to die than to get used to being without him. (But that, perhaps, was not a fair way of putting it, since it is really easier to die than to do almost anything.) The possibility of taking her own life was, however, something to be held in reserve, like a pain-relieving drug that can only be resorted to in extremity. It interested her to think that her words and actions would then assume an authority they could never command so long as there remained the possibility of their repetition; it seemed hard that one should have to go to such lengths to make one’s point.