“You never seem to think, Mona”—he hesitated—“what this might mean to me.”
“Well, what does it mean?”
I tried, I think I tried, not to make my voice sound so yielding that he should suppose me softened toward the shame and wrong of it, nor so hard that he might imagine the hardness grew out of my caring what it meant to him. I must have fallen a little to one side or the other, for it was a long time before he began again.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I am hardly sure myself. There was a time before we came to Outland—how long ago was that, Mona?—when I fell short of much that you said and thought. There was something in books and poetry and music, especially in music, that you were always expecting me to understand, and the expectation irritated me. I fell into the way of denying and despising that something, and trying—I am afraid succeeding, too, in making myself feel that it sprang from some superiority in me not to understand.... Are you listening, Mona?”
“Yes, Herman.”
“It was not that I felt the want of it so much in myself, but other people—you, Mona—missed it in me. There was a door to all that, about to swing upon the latch ... and I could never swing it. And then we came to this free life ... and Zirriloë.... Did you think I was in love with her, Mona?”
“Were you in love with her?”
“I don’t know ... she made the door swing back ... she had such a way of walking ... and that little smile of hers coming and going ... she was all those things made manifest. A man would understand. I liked to do things for her. It was a way of serving all the loveliness of women ... it was serving you, Mona....”
“Ah,” I said, “I would have understood better if the service had been paid in person.”
“I suppose so.”