"She's not an adventuress."

"You mean that she professes to act on the new theories? The
stuff that awful women rave about on platforms?"

"Oh, I don't think she pretended to have a theory----"

"She hadn't even that excuse?"

"She had the excuse of her loneliness, her unhappiness--of
miseries and humiliations that a woman like you can't even
guess. She had nothing to look back to but indifference or
unkindness--nothing to look forward to but anxiety. She saw
I was sorry for her and it touched her. She made too much
of it--she exaggerated it. I ought to have seen the danger,
but I didn't. There's no possible excuse for what I did."

Anna listened to him in speechless misery. Every word he
spoke threw back a disintegrating light on their own past.
He had come to her with an open face and a clear conscience
--come to her from this! If his security was the security of
falsehood it was horrible; if it meant that he had
forgotten, it was worse. She would have liked to stop her
ears, to close her eyes, to shut out every sight and sound
and suggestion of a world in which such things could be; and
at the same time she was tormented by the desire to know
more, to understand better, to feel herself less ignorant
and inexpert in matters which made so much of the stuff of
human experience. What did he mean by "a moment's folly, a
flash of madness"? How did people enter on such adventures,