"Even if we are often led to desire through the sense of beauty can you say that the beautiful is what we desire?"
Hand leads the discussion into the realm of romance and attraction over dinner. He draws Bertha's attention to the complicated nature of attraction, doubting the purely exterior functions of attraction. Perhaps people are attracted to their mates for reasons which are sometimes masochistic or self-serving, which have nothing to do with complimenting the other person's physical or internal beauty.
"And you never spoke! You had only to speak a word -- to save me from myself. You were trying me."
Rowan explains to Hand that he had been closely observing his friend's actions the previous evening over dinner. He saw every gesture and heard every word of flirtation, but he said nothing. In this quotation Hand accuses Rowan of setting him up for failure by testing his attraction to Bertha in this manner.
"You may then know in soul and body, in a hundred forms, and ever restlessly, what some old theologian, Duns Scotus, I think, called a death of the spirit."
In response to Hand's repeated entreaties of friendship, Rowan confronts his friend with the pain of his real situation. He has watched his wife be stolen in the course of an evening, making Rowan's own mind a horrible place. He doubts himself severely because of her easy betrayal. With a threat, he warns Hand that he may face the same fate having become the perpetrator this time.
"If it were not only something brutal with this person or that -- for a few moments. If it were something fine and spiritual -- with one person only -- with one woman. And perhaps brutal too. It usually comes to that sooner or later. Would you try to forget and forgive that?"
Confronting his wife, Rowan uses hypotheticals to trick her into condemning herself. He asks her to imagine him in Hand's place. Would she forgive him? Mirroring their conversation at the dinner party regarding Hand's advances, Rowan makes her the judge of her own fate and eagerly awaits her answer. He demonstrates a pattern of cynicism in which he sets loved ones up for decisions which he anticipates they will fail, speaking to a deeper sense of insecurity in which Rowan does not feel eligible for love.
