Alfred bit the inside of his lower lip as she talked about his misadventure, as she'd called it. He didn't think of it that way at all, and if she thought that the only memories he carried with him from those five years of his life were negative, she was mistaken — but she would hardly be the first. Most of the people he met in England didn't think there was anything to the story of the Sycorax beyond tragedy, and Alfred didn't bother to correct them. It would be insensitive in certain ways to all of those whose lives were lost, and disingenuous to pretend that the really horrible things he'd experienced hadn't left as much of a mark on him as the positive ones. That, and most people simply weren't capable of understanding. It wasn't worth his time or their trouble to try and convey the depth that an experience like that brought, when they had never and would never go through anything similar, so he didn't try — and he wouldn't try now, with her, either. She might have traveled and had an interesting career, but she was still, on the face of things, just another stranger, and the assumptions she'd made about his experience so far didn't lead him to believe she was any more inclined to understand it than anyone else he'd met in England.

Ignoring that bit of it, he still felt that her explanation was dissatisfying, but not because he thought her logic was flawed or that she was wrong, necessarily. It was disappointing because she was probably right, and he was probably being a little naive to have expected that the world could be any other way — and that in and of itself was disappointing enough. But that was hardly her fault.

"I suppose so," he responded with half a sigh. "Maybe that's where that phrase comes from: nothing good lasts."