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Show 35 be seen upon her face, she speaks. "When you've lived a lot of your life towards a single moment, and that moment disappears," she begins, but she does not finish the sentence. She stares distractedly out the window, into the trees. "It's been important to me to live my life with you, John. I wanted to end it with you." Robeck watches his old, stained hands knot, but says nothing; he is caught in a curiously ambivalent, difficult moment, where on the one hand he seems to be rediscovering the young, mysterious, idealistic girl he had married, but on the other hand finds the gulf between himself and this old woman increasingly vast. He knows that he has humored this fantasy of hers, but he cannot see why she does not now give it up. But Annis rouses herself from her reverie: she is suddenly wholly matter-of- fact, and the dreamy quality of her voice is gone. "John," she says, "Look. I can't force you to do anything. And I don't want to force you to do anything, especially not this." "You said that before," he says. "But I still have to decide what I want for myself, you know, alone. That's what I'm doing in here: trying to figure out whether I should it without you." His immediate impulse is to say don't, please don't, but he catches himself in midsentence: all these compassionate years he and she have attempted to keep from influencing each other when they could, from requiring, admonishing, manipulating each other, so that the one would do what the other chose; instead, they had sought to leave each other as much leeway and freedom as possible. |