"What can you mean by thoughts going backward?"
"Now that I know time is measured for me, so much and no more; I like to live over the days that are gone. It spins out my life to live the dead years over again. This is the room Mario loved. His books are on those shelves, the books that opened a new world for me: the Italian historians, the Italian poets. In the first year of our life in this house, before I was the fashion, we used to sit here of an evening, long evenings, from nine till midnight, talking, talking, talking, or Mario reading to me. He was a banker, and a dealer in money; but he read poetry exquisitely."
"Vera!" Susan ejaculated suddenly, and sat staring.
"What's the matter?"
"I believe you loved Provana better than ever you have loved Claude."
"I don't know," Vera said dreamily.
She had been talking in a dreamy way, as if she were hardly conscious that anyone was listening to her.
"Perhaps you never were really in love with your second husband?"
"Yes. I loved him too much—and," after a perceptible pause, "not enough."
"Darling, I can't make you out."