Panic seized me. “Don’t tell me--please don’t tell me----” I doubted that I could bear it. The wind was moaning, going around and around my tower room. I felt as if Eva were more intently looking in, as if she were reproaching me with “How can you listen to things against me?” I put my hand over my mouth to stifle a shriek. But his voice droned on, and beat my nerves into a dulled peace. “I was so glad the surface of her writing-table had been polished for her home-coming; because she leaned against it: her hands rested on it. She was leaning back against the desk, but her shoulders were thrust forward; she gave me the impression of being prepared for me to charge at her and therefore in need of solidarity behind her. That room of hers had a glow, hadn’t it? The glow shone on her, and her hair----” He paused. “She was an unapproachable saint. But a man can’t derive solace from the evidence of his eyes.” His pause, this time, was longer. “By the way, I noticed that her eyes were extraordinarily brilliant. She never removed them from my face; they were so still that they were like the eyes of a vision.” He had wondered, he said, if she wished for ardour, or if she fearfully anticipated it. She had seemed suspended between two menaces. “She wanted help!” I cried to him. “Can’t you see that she wanted help?” I saw, now, that there were new lines on his face. His mouth was more like his mother’s. He would be a grim man, soon. He asked me if I had ever noticed how easily she waved aside the point of view of another? Not a motion of her hands, and yet she would have definitely waved away what she did not wish to consider. She had said: “I’ve always been honest with you.” There was something ominous in this: he had not, at the moment, wanted her to be honest. An idea that had always been at the back of his head sprang to the front of his consciousness: she had never wanted to be a wife, had, when one came down to it, resented being a wife. When she shook her head, over his questions, he felt her shaking off all consideration of her life with him. I asked why he insisted on telling me this, and he said simply: “She told you.” “Not after she had seen you. She might never have told me these details of the break with you.” But he said: “Oh, yes, she would.” He was increasingly agitated, and through his emotion became reluctant to go fully into what nevertheless he doggedly told me. I reflected that if I refused to hear him out he would tell his mother. He had arrived at the stage where he was impelled to tell some mute and horrified woman. He became self-hypnotized, almost acting the ensuing scene between himself and his wife.