He was startled by the even, lifeless quality of her voice. “Of course!”
“In just a word or two, I suppose?”
“If you can.”
She knelt where she could look away toward the west—toward Mexico; and she noted, with mild surprise, that a new moon hung low in the sky, sinking slowly into the desert. It seemed to her that years had passed since she had seen the moon—a full moon, swinging, at this hour of the evening, in the eastern sky.
“Come, Sylvia!” It was Harboro’s urgent voice again.
“If I only could!” she said, moving a little in token of her discomfort.
“Why not?”
“I mean, if any of us could ever say what it is that has gone wrong. Everything has gone wrong. From the very beginning. And now you ask me: ‘What’s gone wrong?’ just as you might ask, ‘What time is it, Sylvia?’ or, ‘Who is it coming up the road?’ I can’t tell you what’s gone wrong. If I talked to you a week—a month—I couldn’t tell you half of it. I don’t believe I ever could. I don’t believe I know.”
These vagaries might have touched Harboro at another time; they might have alarmed him. But for the moment wrath stirred in him. He arose almost roughly. “Very well,” he said, “I shall go to your father. I shall have the facts.”
This angry reference to her father—or perhaps it was the roughness of his withdrawal from her—affected her in a new way.