Alan's first thought was of the monstrous incongruity of the thing, the almost physical impossibility of a mesalliance of the sort Mary Standish had revealed to him.

He saw her, young and beautiful, with face and eyes that from the beginning had made him feel all that was good and sweet in life, and behind her he saw the shadow-hulk of John Graham, the pitiless iron-man, without conscience and without soul, coarsened by power, fiendish in his iniquities, and old enough to be her father! A slow smile twisted his lips, but he did not know he smiled.

He pulled himself together without letting her see the physical part of the effort it was taking.

And he tried to find something to say that would help clear her eyes of the agony that was in them.
"That--is a most unreasonable thing--to be true," he said.
It seemed to him his lips were making words out of wood, and that the words were fatuously inefficient compared with what he should have said, or acted, under the circumstances.
She nodded.

"It is.