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.”
“No; you don’t understand,” he returned with sudden bitterness; and on his lips the charge of incomprehension seemed an offense to her.
“I don’t want to—about such things!”
He answered almost harshly: “Don’t be afraid ... you never will...” and for an instant they faced each other like enemies. Then the tears swelled in her throat at his reproach.
“You mean I don’t feel things—I’m too hard?”
“No: you’re too high ... too fine ... such things are too far from you.”
He paused, as if conscious of the futility of going on with whatever he had meant to say, and again, for a short space, they confronted each other, no longer as enemies—so it seemed to her—but as beings of different language who had forgotten the few words they had learned of each other’s speech.