If, on the other hand—as he suggested—she was merely beginning a series of similar experiences, she could scarcely feel encouraged. She sensed that she would never learn to approach love in any way that was materially different, or have the energy to go in for more than a little halfhearted dissembling. Up to this, she had led a life sheltered not from rancor and mistrust but from intimacy; nothing could convince her that this first sharing of her secret existence, more significant even than the offering of her person, represented less than it appeared to. That circumstances might oblige him to withdraw from her she perfectly understood; that he actually felt himself to be less committed appalled her. It confounded all her assumptions, that something so deeply attested should prove totally unpredictable.

She remembered her uncombed hair. Startling him, she got up quickly from the sofa and went into the bedroom. She stood at the dressing table, releasing her hair from the knot of ribbon, and then, with her hand on the hairbrush, stared into the mirror. After a moment, forgetting what she had come for, she sat down on the side of her unmade bed, propped one elbow sidewise on the pillows, and leaned her jaw on her hand.

When he appeared in the doorway, she made a small explanatory gesture with the hairbrush, which still dangled from her right hand, then reached across and replaced it on the dressing table. He leaned for a moment against the doorframe, and when he came into the room she curled her legs up on the crumpled sheets and drew back on the pillows, allowing him to sit at the foot of the bed. They passed, in this way, some minutes of that hot afternoon. Both had the sensation of leaving behind them, simply by changing the scene, the antagonism in the living room.

At last he reached out and took her hand again, as though needing for a little longer to be in touch with her. He frowned into space, and only turned his head when she spoke.

“Tell me,” she asked him, in a voice that was now shaken and fatigued, “what we are going to do.”

The hand holding hers opened briefly and closed again. “There aren’t many possibilities.… We shall see less of each other. Not meet at all, perhaps.” Incongruously, he added: “I will hate that.”

After a pause she repeated, as if he had not answered her: “Tell me what to do.”

He lowered his troubled, abstracted look to her head. “You could go abroad for a while,” he said. “That might help.”

They looked at each other. Her hand grasped his convulsively. “Tell me,” she insisted, almost whispering, “something that won’t be hard, or lonely.”