“‘What can’t be?’
“I came back into the room and sat down by her. ‘This—this—’ I hadn’t any words. ‘Two weeks!’ I said. ‘What’s two weeks?”
“She answered, vaguely, something about their thinking of Spain for the spring—
“‘Two weeks—two weeks!’ I repeated. ‘And the months we’ve lost—the days that belonged to us!’
“‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m thankful it’s settled.’
“Our words seemed irrelevant, haphazard. It was as if each were answering a secret voice, and not what the other was saying.
“‘Don’t you feel anything at all?’ I remember bursting out at her. As I asked it the tears were streaming down her face. I felt angry with her, and was almost glad to note that her lids were red and that she didn’t cry becomingly. I can’t express my sensation to you except by saying that she seemed part of life’s huge league against me. And suddenly I thought of an afternoon we had spent together in the country, on a ferny hill-side, when we had sat under a beech-tree, and her hand had lain palm upward in the moss, close to mine, and I had watched a little black-and-red beetle creeping over it....
“The bell rang, and we heard the voice of a visitor and the click of an umbrella in the umbrella-stand.
“She rose to go into the inner drawing-room, and I caught her suddenly by the wrist. ‘You understand,’ I said, ‘that we can’t go on like this?’
“‘I understand,’ she answered, and moved away to meet her visitor. As I went out I heard her saying in the other room: ‘Yes, we’re really off on the twelfth.’”