..No, decidedly she could
not speak; she no longer even knew what she had meant to
say...
The same experience repeated itself several times that day
and the next. When she and Darrow were apart she exhausted
herself in appeal and interrogation, she formulated with a
fervent lucidity every point in her imaginary argument. But
as soon as she was alone with him something deeper than
reason and subtler than shyness laid its benumbing touch
upon her, and the desire to speak became merely a dim
disquietude, through which his looks, his words, his touch,
reached her as through a mist of bodily pain. Yet this
inertia was torn by wild flashes of resistance, and when
they were apart she began to prepare again what she meant to
say to him.
She knew he could not be with her without being aware of
this inner turmoil, and she hoped he would break the spell
by some releasing word. But she presently understood that
he recognized the futility of words, and was resolutely bent
on holding her to her own purpose of behaving as if nothing
had happened. Once more she inwardly accused him of
insensibility, and her imagination was beset by tormenting
visions of his past...Had such things happened to him
before? If the episode had been an isolated accident--"a
moment of folly and madness", as he had called it--she could
understand, or at least begin to understand (for at a
certain point her imagination always turned back); but if it
were a mere link in a chain of similar experiments, the
thought of it dishonoured her whole past.
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