She said nothing, not so much because she was fearful, but because she didn’t have the words to describe what had been taking place inside her for months now. Had she known what was taking place inside her, she would have told him, no doubt; and, understanding Anna, he would have understood. But it was the first time he had seen her without words to define something, and for that reason, being wholly bound up in his emotions, instead of telling himself that she was momentarily at a loss for words no doubt, as he would have done had he been feeling less anxious, he thought she was deliberately avoiding the issue. For the first time, he thought like an ordinary man and ascribed ordinary behavior to her — he, who had always known exactly what it was she was and wasn’t saying, and was wedded to her the way a vase is wedded to the water it encloses. They wound their way laboriously through the wood, they were no longer holding hands, and when he paused for a moment to gaze up at the top of a tree and she came over to give him a little kiss on the cheek, he turned away and resembled an eagle all of a sudden. Never before had this happened, not once in twenty years had he turned away when she had come up to him. Their clothes, the damp tree trunks, and the stones were black; the rest of the landscape was a dazzling white. When they pulled out onto the road, which they both knew like the back of their hand, he went the wrong way and they drove for miles in the wrong direction without either of them noticing. [...]