"Excuse me, they make all the difference. But, of course, there's no extenuation for deception. Therefore, if you insist on putting it that way—if—if it has made the whole thing intolerable to you, it seems to me that perhaps I ought, don't you know, to release you from your obligations——"
She looked at him. She knew that he had understood the meaning and the depth of her repugnance. She did not know that such understanding is rare in the circumstances, nor could she see that in itself it was a revelation of a certain capacity for the "goodness" she had once believed in. But she did see that she was being treated with a delicacy and consideration she had not expected of this man with the strange devil. It touched her in spite of her repugnance. It made her own that she had expected nothing short of it until yesterday.
"Do you insist?" he went on. "After what I've told you?"
"After what you've told me—no. I'm ready to believe that you did not mean to deceive me."
"Doesn't that make any difference?" he asked tenderly.
"Yes. It makes some difference—in my judgment of you."
"You mean you're not—as Edith would say—going to be too hard on me?"
"I hope," said Anne, "I should never be too hard on any one."
"Then," he inquired, eager to be released from the strain of a most insupportable situation, "what are we going to do next?"
He had assumed that the supreme issue had been decided by a polite evasion; and his question had been innocent of all momentous meaning. He merely wished to know how they were going to spend the day that was before them, since they had to spend days, and spend them together. But Anne's tense mind contemplated nothing short of the supreme issue that, for her, was not to be evaded, nor yet to be decided hastily.