She lifted her eyes to his face. “I think I only wanted to speak her name. It’s not right that we should seem so afraid of it. If I were really afraid of it I should have to give you up,” she said. He bent over her and caught her to him. “Ah, you can’t give me up now!” he exclaimed. She suffered him to hold her fast without speaking; but the old dread was between them again, and it was on her lips to cry out: “How can I help it, when I AM so afraid?” XXXV The next morning the dread was still there, and she understood that she must snatch herself out of the torpor of the will into which she had been gradually sinking, and tell Darrow that she could not be his wife. The knowledge came to her in the watches of a sleepless night, when, through the tears of disenchanted passion, she stared back upon her past. There it lay before her, her sole romance, in all its paltry poverty, the cheapest of cheap adventures, the most pitiful of sentimental blunders. She looked about her room, the room where, for so many years, if her heart had been quiescent her thoughts had been alive, and pictured herself henceforth cowering before a throng of mean suspicions, of unavowed compromises and concessions. In that moment of self-searching she saw that Sophy Viner had chosen the better part, and that certain renunciations might enrich where possession would have left a desert. Passionate reactions of instinct fought against these efforts of her will. Why should past or future coerce her, when the present was so securely hers? Why insanely surrender what the other would after all never have? Her sense of irony whispered that if she sent away Darrow it would not be to Sophy Viner, but to the first woman who crossed his path--as, in a similar hour, Sophy Viner herself had crossed it...But the mere fact that she could think such things of him sent her shuddering back to the opposite pole. She pictured herself gradually subdued to such a conception of life and love, she pictured Effie growing up under the influence of the woman she saw herself becoming--and she hid her eyes from the humiliation of the picture...