She stood up trembling. “You’re free to be as generous to her as you please!”
“Yes: you’ve made it clear to me that I’m free. But there’s nothing I can do for her that will help her half as much as your understanding her would.”
“Nothing you can do for her? You can marry her!”
His face hardened. “You certainly couldn’t wish her a worse fate!”
“It must have been what she expected…relied on…”He was silent, and she broke out: “Or what is she? What are you? It’s too horrible! On your way here…to me…” She felt the tears in her throat and stopped.
“That was it,” he said bluntly. She stared at him.
“I was on my way to you–after repeated delays and postponements of your own making. At the very last you turned me back with a mere word–and without explanation. I waited for a letter; and none came. I’m not saying this to justify myself. I’m simply trying to make you understand. I felt hurt and bitter and bewildered. I thought you meant to give me up. And suddenly, in my way, I found some one to be sorry for, to be of use to. That, I swear to you, was the way it began. The rest was a moment’s folly…a flash of madness…as such things are. We’ve never seen each other since…”
Anna was looking at him coldly. “You sufficiently describe her in saying that!”
“Yes, if you measure her by conventional standards–which is what you always declare you never do.”
“Conventional standards? A girl who—-” She was checked by a sudden rush of almost physical repugnance. Suddenly she broke out: “I always thought her an adventuress!”
“Always?”
“I don’t mean always…but after you came…”
“She’s not an adventuress.”
“You mean that she professes to act on the new theories? The stuff that awful women rave about on platforms?”
“Oh, I don’t think she pretended to have a theory—-”
“She hadn’t even that excuse?”
“She had the excuse of her loneliness, her unhappiness–of miseries and humiliations that a woman like you can’t even guess. She had nothing to look back to but indifference or unkindness–nothing to look forward to but anxiety. She saw I was sorry for her and it touched her. She made too much of it–she exaggerated it. I ought to have seen the danger, but I didn’t. There’s no possible excuse for what I did.”
Anna listened to him in speechless misery. Every word he spoke threw back a disintegrating light on their own past. He had come to her with an open face and a clear conscience –come to her from this! If his security was the security of falsehood it was horrible; if it meant that he had forgotten, it was worse. She would have liked to stop her ears, to close her eyes, to shut out every sight and sound and suggestion of a world in which such things could be; and at the same time she was tormented by the desire to know more, to understand better, to feel herself less ignorant and inexpert in matters which made so much of the stuff of human experience. What did he mean by “a moment’s folly, a flash of madness”? How did people enter on such adventures, how pass out of them without more visible traces of their havoc? Her imagination recoiled from the vision of a sudden debasing familiarity: it seemed to her that her thoughts would never again be pure…
“I swear to you,” she heard Darrow saying, “it was simply that, and nothing more.”
She wondered at his composure, his competence, at his knowing so exactly what to say. No doubt men often had to make such explanations: they had the formulas by heart…A leaden lassitude descended on her. She passed from flame and torment into a colourless cold world where everything surrounding her seemed equally indifferent and remote. For a moment she simply ceased to feel.
She became aware that Darrow was waiting for her to speak, and she made an effort to represent to herself the meaning of what he had just said; but her mind was as blank as a blurred mirror. Finally she brought out: “I don’t think I understand what you’ve told me.”