“I’m sure you agree,” she continued, with that offhandedness, he thought, so uncharacteristic of her, that she had developed in these last few days—like a parody of what she objected to in his own manner. As if to irritate him even further, she added, “on the whole,” as they paused at the top of the avenue before one extremity of a colossal wall.

There was a restaurant to their right, among the trees. “Shall we have something now, or later?” he asked her.

“It’s so hot,” she said.

He put his book in his pocket, and they went into the café and stood at the bar. The boy took two wet glasses from the draining board and filled them with aranciata. In the garden at the back, a girl was clearing the deserted lunch tables. Her stiff, short skirt spread out around her and exposed the backs of her knees each time she bent over to collect another dish. She took, in her high-heeled sandals, such tiny, tapping steps that it seemed she would never complete the journey from one table to the next. Now and then she glanced at the boy in the bar, and whenever she looked up he was watching her.

“On the whole” indeed, the man thought angrily as they left the café and passed through a gap in the great wall into an open field of ruins. “I’m not quite sure what we’re talking about,” he told her, although nothing more had been said.

“Simply that it wouldn’t work.” She stood still to gaze at a sheet of water, a long, shallow pond in which a few lilies were trailing. “We would make one another unhappy—we do already—and it’s as well that we found out in time. That’s all. It’s quite impossible.”

“I don’t understand,” he said stubbornly.

“And that,” she returned, “is precisely why.”

I must have hurt her vanity, he decided, since she was not usually cruel. Opinionated, sulky sometimes—but even that she couldn’t sustain; she would give in at the first appeal. (Preferring consistency, he could not value such concessions.) If he were to say now, for example, whatever it might be she wanted him to say—that nothing mattered to him but their love for each other, something along those lines—she would come round. Though why she should need that, why she minded so, he couldn’t imagine. She herself, after all, had other things in her life, had, in fact, loved before this, more intensely; he didn’t know who it was—and had not the least desire to know, he told himself, his mind ranging hastily over the circle of their friends.

“I don’t really think you care deeply about anything,” she was saying now, as though the observation might be of passing interest. “Except, of course, your work.”