She was calm again, but it was the calmness of detachment, perhaps of indifference. She sat immobile in her bed, her hands resting on the border of the neatly drawn spread, and gazed at him with wide eyes which seemed faintly to question his being there, but more on the ground of the loss of his time than of hers. There was a tepid friendliness in her manner that seemed to accept his status of the person most nearly interested in her fate. And she was surprisingly candid about what she had done. “Don’t worry, it won’t happen again. Because the circumstances won’t happen again. When Mark denied those questions about the...” She turned her eyes to the East River, rolling and turbid, below her window. She seemed to be debating, but more as a matter of taste than of emotional concern, whether she should articulate exactly what it was that Mark had denied. "You see, the whole thing was suddenly ... well, so public, so crass, so humiliating, that I simply couldn’t bear it. I wanted to blot it out, at any cost.
