When I told her, we were sitting in Room 301 on Huron. It did not matter especially what I said, insofar as its only importance ultimately was constituted in the way she received the fact.

My friend, the Irishman, had been talking too, and it seemed to bore her, although you never could tell. I vaguely begrudged him the strange capability he had to force people to listen to him, somehow touching some sense of propriety in them, so that as often as not they listened more attentively to him than to those who actually interested them. In a strange way, it was as if he put more at stake, although really nothing had ever been put at stake. It was a vulnerability he pretended to have, and also pretended not to see, so that tacitly he invited his audience to help him cover it up, to listen and secure his sense of self, to protect him from making a fool of himself.

When I told her, I ended a long period of self-denial. But I told her not because I hoped to prove something by what I said, but simply because I felt at ease. All year, I had hardly said a personal thing about myself, and I knew that as a result my conversation had been a good deal more interesting to her than it would have been had I been honest from the start. But nevertheless, perhaps without knowing it, I had been waiting for an opportunity to tell her the truth, a way to say it casually, as if it meant nothing to me, so that the onus would be upon her to relate it to the person she thought she knew. What I said now was intimate and also, despite his presence, entirely private, since my words seemed to pass by him without recognition of any kind. And she accepted this intimacy, answering me not with words, but with her silence.

I realised suddenly that had she been courted by a man, so far as I could tell, the affair would have been made up of just such silences as this, and what I had just told her would perhaps be the first part of that courtship. But I was not courting her, so far as I knew. And yet, I might have been, nevertheless. It was this that struck me.

For an instant I felt as if I had overlooked what was right in front of me, what perhaps I might have liked, and, in liking, perhaps ultimately have needed. For, when I looked up, no longer thinking about the words I had spoken, there was something fixed upon her face - a question, a statement of acceptance, a summons, a suspicion - it was impossible to say which of these things, or even how many of them, together.

It could have been a smile, and yet it had neither the comprehension nor comprehensiveness of a smile. I still wanted to believe that it was a smile, although it reminded me of no smile I had ever seen. Perhaps all that seemed unclear in her expression was simply the naked, uncombined elements of an incipient smile still waiting to be born, an uncertain mood which should never be correlated too soon, but which nevertheless might have, time must come to tell, an intimacy and certainty of its own.