"You see," he said slowly, "what I did not then understand, could not then have been expected to understand, was that I had really gone out of myself in love to the woman on the bed in the room. No one understands that a thing of that sort may occur like a thought flashing across the mind. What I am nowadays coming to believe and would like to get fixed in your mind, young woman, is that such moments come into all lives, but that in all the millions of people who are born and live long or short lives only a few ever really come to find out what life is like. There is a kind of perpetual denial of life, you understand.

"I was dazed as I stood in the hallway outside that woman's room long ago. There had been a flashing kind of something between the woman and myself, in the moment I have described to you, when she came up to me out of sleep. Something deep in our two beings had been touched and I could not quickly recover. There had been a marriage, something intensely personal to our two selves and by chance it had been made a kind of public affair. I suppose it would have turned out the same way had we two been alone in the house. We were very young. Sometimes I think all the people in the world are very young. They cannot carry the fire of life when it flashes to life in their hands.

"And in the room, behind the closed door, the woman must have been having, at just that moment, some such feeling as myself. She had raised herself up and was now sitting on the edge of the bed. She was listening to the sudden silence of the house as my friend and I were listening. It may be an absurd thing to say, but it is nevertheless true that my friend's mother and sister, who had just come into the house, were both, in some unconscious way, affected also as they stood with their coats on, down stairs, also listening.

"Just then, at that moment, in the room in the darkness, the woman began to sob like a broken-hearted child. There had been a thing quite tremendous come to her and she could not hold it. To be sure the immediate cause of her weeping that way, the way in which she would have explained her grief, was shame. That was what she thought had happened to her, that she had been put into a shameful ridiculous position. She was a young girl. I dare say that thoughts had already come into her mind concerning what all the others would think. At any rate I know that at the moment and afterwards I was more pure than herself.

"The sound of her sobbing rang through the house and down stairs my friend's mother and sister, who had been standing and listening as I have said, now ran to the foot of the stairway leading up.