Naturally, she didn’t imagine poor old Clem had planned an affair in advance, but even at the time she had felt he was ready for something of the kind—that she was the first person he happened to notice. For the fact was that they were not really suited to one another, which he would have discovered if he had ever tried to understand her properly. He had no idea of what she was like, none whatever. To this day, she was sure, he thought her trivial, almost frivolous. (And she was actually an acutely sensitive person.) No wonder they found nothing to say to one another now.

It was a strain, however, their being alone like this. And how like May to have arranged it this way, how ostentatiously forbearing. Magnanimous, Clem would have called it (solemn again), but May had a way, Nettie felt, of being magnanimous, as it were, at one’s expense. Still, what did it matter? Since they had invited her, after she had run into May in a shop one afternoon, she could hardly have refused to come. In an hour or two it would be over; she need never come again.

It did matter. It wouldn’t be over, really. Her life was associated with Clem’s, however little he might mean to her now, and she must always be different because she had known him. She wasn’t saying that he was responsible for the pattern of her life—she wasn’t that unjust. It was, rather, that he cropped up, uninvited, in her thoughts almost every day. She found herself wondering over and over again what he would think of things that happened to her, or wanting to tell him a story that would amuse him. And surely that is the sense, she thought, in which one might say that love is eternal. She was pleased when people spoke well of him in her hearing—and yet resentful, because she had no part, now, in his good qualities. And when she heard small accusations against him, she wondered whether she should contest them. But, for all she knew, they might be justified. That was the trouble with experience; it taught you that most people were capable of anything, so that loyalty was never quite on firm ground—or, rather, became a matter of pardoning offenses instead of denying their existence.

She sympathized with his attitude. It was tempting to confine oneself to what one could cope with. And one couldn’t cope with love. (In her experience, at any rate, it had always got out of hand.) But, after all, it was the only state in which one could consider oneself normal; which engaged all one’s capacities, rather than just those developed by necessity—or shipwreck. One never realized how much was lacking until one fell in love again, because love—like pain, actually—couldn’t be properly remembered or conveyed.