She glanced at his small highly colored face with its little mustache above the full smiling lips. Again she was ashamed of seeing him so plainly. She wished that she were exalted out of so definite a physical perception of him.
"Julia. Julia." He repeated her name ruminatively. "You did come to care for me. What do you feel, Julia? What has this made you feel?" He could not bear the sense of her separateness from him. He was obsessed by curiosity about her and a lustful desire to outrage her mental integrity. He could not bear the feeling that the body which had possessed him so completely yet belonged to itself. His eyes, intimate without tenderness, smiled with a guilty look into hers.
She gazed at him as if she wanted to escape. For a moment she wished that they could have disappeared from each other's lives in the instant which culminated their embrace. Their talk made her feel herself grotesque. "I don't know," she said. "How can I say? I don't know."
Though he would not admit it to himself, her air of timidity and bewilderment pleased him. "How many lovers have you had, Julia?"
She thought, He only asked that to hurt me. She could not answer him. She smiled. Her lips quivered. She looked at her hands.
She saw him only as something which contributed to her experience of herself. She had her experience of him before she gave herself to him. What happened between them happened to her alone.
"What do you feel? Tell me? How deeply do you love me, Julia?" He knew that he was making her resentful toward him, but it was only when women felt nothing at all in regard to him that he found it hard to bear. He grasped her hands and held them.
"Of course I love you deeply." Her voice trembled. She turned her head aside.
"What do you feel about your husband, Julia?"
In spite of the pressure of his hands she felt Dudley far away, dissolving from her.