“It needn’t be like that…” She covered her face with her hands. “Rowland, you know I’m right. Those feelings don’t last. You may feel like that now—I may… But if we’re determined, if we ignore them, avoid meeting—we’ll forget. All this, all this—it will become weaker and weaker, and finally absurd, and then one day we’ll both look back, and we’ll think—Thank heaven I was sensible. What a fool I was—how could I ever have imagined—”

She stopped. She watched his face, lit by concern, become still and set. He took her hand in his.

“You think we’re imagining this?” he said quietly. “If so, thank God for imagination. I trust it beyond reason. Are you telling me you don’t?”

There was a silence then while he waited for her reply. Outside the room, a church bell tolled the hour, traffic passed, voices from other lives floated upward from the street. Gini looked at her imaginings, and his. She could see a possible future, just as he did. It was hazy, a little misted, like the light of a spring morning in which the loveliness of the day to come is glimpsed. She watched her life fork, north, south, right, left. The vision she now saw was very like the bright panorama Pascal had first opened up to her eyes. Both men seemed able to dismantle some defense in her mind, flooding it with illumination and promise. She was unsure if their ability to do this was innate, or if she herself gifted it to them. To discover that another man besides Pascal, and so soon after Pascal, could achieve this, confused her. It made her distrust joy, and it also made her distrust herself.

Besides such insubstantiality, duty and loyalty and the settled dailiness of established love seemed so sure, and so commendable. It was a question of discipline, she told herself, of honoring vows made, and remaining true, therefore, to Pascal and to herself. She looked one last time at the other Gini, the mirror woman who was so much more prepared to flout rules and take risks, and she rejected her, canceled her out.

She felt an immediate diminution, an intense stab of loss. This she ignored; if she felt unaccountably less now, she told herself, she would feel more, she would feel enfranchised, in due course.

“You have to catch a plane. I have to go to the hospital,” she said.

“I see.” Rowland at once released her and stepped back. “That’s your final decision?”

“Yes, Rowland. It is.”

She saw the reply glance like a blow across his face. He half turned in a blinded way, then turned back. He glanced down at his watch, checked the airline ticket in the pocket of his coat, braced himself, and then said in a stiff, abrupt way the one thing she feared most.

“We had unprotected sex,” he began awkwardly. “I’m sorry, but I have to say this. I broke one of my own inviolable rules in that respect. If there were any possibility that you could become pregnant—I couldn’t walk away from that. You do understand?”