If presented alone, stripped of the narrator's comments, this dialogue would be flirtatious and romantic, similar in many ways to Decoud's idealistic avowal to Antonia in the previous chapter. Indeed, one gets the feeling that Emily is literally flirting with her husband in the hope of some reassuring physical contact.

In many ways this dialogue is the mirror image of the Decoud-Antonia one. In that one, the man was trying to lure the woman away from idealism and into a marriage. Here, in a marriage already based on (supposedly) shared ideals, it is the woman who is hoping to lure the man away from idealism. Both attempts to dissuade the idealist are failures, and serve to set up the scene between Decoud and Emily that follows.