Brachey got slowly to his feet; stood by the table. He couldn't raise his eyes; he could only study the outline of his plate and move it a little, this way and that, and pick up crumbs from the table-cloth. His mind was leaden; the sense of unreality that had come to him on the preceding day was now at a grotesque climax. He literally could not think. This, he felt, was the final severe test of his character, and it exhibited him as a failure. He was then, after all, a lone wolf; his instinct had been sound at the start, his nature lacked the quality, the warmth and richness of feeling, that the man who would claim a woman's love must offer her. He could suffer—the pain that even now, as he stood listless there, downcast, heavily fingering a tin plate, was torturing him to the limits of his capacity to endure, told him that— out suffering seemed a poor gift to bring the woman he loved. ... And here they were, unable to turn back. It was unthinkable; yet it was true. His reason kept thundering at his ear the perhaps tragic fact that his spirit was unable to grasp.... Braehey, during this hour—with a bitterness so deep as to border on despair—told himself that his lack amounted to abnormality. His case seemed quite hopeless. Yet here he was; and here, irrevocably, was she. The harm, whatever it might prove to be, and in spite of his sensitive, fire conquest of them emotional problem (at such a price, this!) was done. And there were no compensations. Here they were, lost, groping helplessly toward each other through a dark labyrinth.
Even when she turned (he heard her, and felt her eyes) he could not look up.
Then he heard her voice; an unsteady voice, very low; and he felt again the simple honesty, the naively child-like quality, that had seemed her finest gift. It was the artist strain in her, of course. She was not ashamed of her feeling, of her tears; there had never been pretense or self-consciousness in her. And while she now, at first, uttered merely his name—'"John!”—his inner ear heard her saying again, as she had said during their first talk in the tennis court—“I wonder if it is like a net.”... Yes, she seemed to be saying that again.
But he was speaking; out of a thick throat:
“Yes?”
“What are we to do?”
He met this with a sort of mental dishonesty that he found himself unable to avoid. “Well—if all goes well, we shall be safe at Ping Yang within forty-eight hours.”
“I don't mean that.”
“Well...”
“I shouldn't have come.”