“Enormously, for a time. I was very young.”
He laughed uneasily. The old wound still hurt.
“Love is difficult,” she said. “So it seems, from novels I have read, and people I have met. I have had no experience myself. . . .”
“How is that?”
“Hunger, poverty, and terror do not seem to encourage the love instinct, except in a brutal way. Anyhow, it has left me alone. It is no doubt a pleasant thing. Something one ought not to miss in life.”
She spoke without any embarrassment or self-consciousness, but as a child, simply, before the mysteries of life. Yet she was not a child, but a woman who had lived through bloody Revolution and great brutalities. Her simplicity in regard to love was not through ignorance, but inexperience.
“I should be glad to love you,” she said, “if it would help your broken heart at all. It would be very nice for me.”
She made this astonishing offer with the same simplicity and sincerity. It was as though she offered to bind up some wound.
The snow was heavy upon them, and in whirling flakes around them. He could hardly see her face or figure. They were alone in a world of whiteness in the ruin of Moscow.
“It’s good of you,” he said. “I shall be glad of your comradeship.”