Neither could I have anticipated that she would give me the intelligence I most dreaded. When her girl led me into her parlor, I saw her standing nervously, leafing through a volume whose name, I suspected, she would be unable to tell me if I put her to the question. She set the book down and smiled at me in the forced way of a surgeon preparing a painful operation. Her green eyes were more deeply sunk than I had recollected.
“A glass of wine?” she asked, knowing well I would take it. All illusions were now washed away by her anxious expression, and I took the wine from her shaking hand, eager to fortify myself.
“I have not yet informed your uncle,” she said to me, once we were both seated, “as I wished to tell you first. I could not endure to think you would hear it from another.”
I say now that I had no idea in my mind what she was about to say, yet I must have known, for I recall gripping the arms of the chair and half rising, before lowering myself once more.
“I am to be married,” she announced. Her lips were parted, a pantomime’s portrait of dread. Then, recollecting herself, she applied another forced smile. When I think of her married, I continue to think of her with that counterfeit grin.
I said nothing for some eternal minutes. I stared ahead and wondered. I wondered whom she had found to be more worthy than I. I thought of all the time we had spent together- as friends, of course- and the simple joy I had taken in her nearness, in the tingle of pleasure of being in her company. I thought of the thrill of possibility, as though every moment with her represented the chance that it might be the one that would change her mind. All that was now dashed.