He felt grief for the people of the Maldives, but, to his shame, the grief was mingled with a purely selfish pang: the sense that he and Beatrice, for the first time since the beginning of their relationship, were not going through the same things together.
Two kinds of grief - for others and for himself. Not contradictory or selfish at all. Can grief (genuine grief) ever be selfish, in the sense of self-seeking rather than comfort seeking?
