“But why?” Ezra gasps.

He stands stunned in the hallway, still in his galoshes, coat half unbuttoned, a night’s train journey written on his face.

“I don’t want to be married to you,” she repeats.

“But why, Sophie?”

His look of utter bewilderment belies the least suspicion of a rift between them. Hardening his face, biting on his pipe, he struggles to maintain calm. A shattered man, he has not lost all pride. It is difficult not to be moved. Ezra has his moments of beauty: just now, staring expressionless, an animal dazed by a sudden blow, he seems so solitary and forlorn—a stranger, as if he were already deserted, the person she cast out into the street, cut out of her life. If he were to walk out now without a word, she could not bear it.