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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Cytherea, by Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Cytherea
+
+Author: Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+
+Release Date: November, 2004 [EBook #6847]
+This file was first posted on January 31, 2003
+Last Updated: June 20, 2013
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CYTHEREA ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Michelle Shephard, Charles Franks and the
+Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+CYTHEREA.
+
+
+By Joseph Hergesheimer
+
+
+_For_ DOROTHY _Charming in the present and Secure with the past_
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+It was, probably, Lee Randon realized, the last time he would play golf
+that year. He concluded this standing on a shorn hill about which the
+country was spread in sere diminishing tones to the grey horizon. Below,
+a stream held a cold glimmer in a meadow of brown, frost-killed grass;
+and the wind, the bitter flaws where Lee stood, was thinly scattered
+with soft crystals of snow. He was alone, no one would play with him
+so late in the season, and there had been no boy present to carry his
+clubs. Yes, this was the last time he'd try it until spring: Peyton
+Morris, who had married Lee's niece and was at least fourteen years his
+junior, had been justified in a refusal which, at its expression, had
+made Lee cross.
+
+At worse than forty-five, he had told Morris curtly, he was more active
+than the young men hardly out of the universities. To this Peyton had
+replied that undoubtedly Lee had more energy than he; personally he felt
+as old as--as Egypt. Ridiculous, Lee decided, trying to make up his mind
+whether he might continue playing or return, beaten by November, to the
+clubhouse. In the end, with numb fingers, he picked up his ball, and
+walked slowly back over the empty course. The wind, now, was behind him,
+and increasingly comfortable he grew reflective:
+
+The comparison of Peyton Morris's age with his, recalling the fact,
+to be precise, of his forty-seven years, created a vague questioning
+dissatisfaction. Suddenly he saw himself--a comfortable body in a
+comfortable existence, a happy existence, he added sharply--objectively;
+and the stout figure in knickerbockers, rough stockings, a yellow
+buckskin jacket and checked cap pulled over a face which, he felt,
+was brightly red, surprised and a little annoyed him. In the abrupt
+appearance of this image it seemed that there had been no transitional
+years between his slender youth and the present. He had an absurd
+momentary impression that an act of malicious magic had in a second
+transformed him into a shape decidedly too heavy for grace. His
+breathing, where the ground turned upward, was even slightly labored.
+
+It was, Lee thought with all the intensity of an original discovery,
+devilish unpleasant to grow old; to die progressively on one's feet,
+he elaborated the fact. That was what happened to a man--his liver
+thickened, his teeth went, his veins became brittle pipes of lime. Worse
+than all that, his potency, the spirit and heat of living, met without
+any renewal its inescapable winter. This might, did, occur while his
+being was rebellious with vain hope. Today, in spite of the slight
+clogging of his breath, his body's loss of flexibility, his imagination
+was as vigorous, as curious, as ever ... take that nonsense about the
+doll, which, in a recalled classical allusion, he had privately named
+Cytherea. Peyton Morris would never have entered into that!
+
+Lee Randon, on one of his infrequent trips to New York, had seen it in
+a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue, and instantly it had captivated
+his attention, brought him to a halt. The doll, beautifully dressed in
+the belled skirt of the eighteen-forties, wore plum-colored silk with a
+bodice and wide short sleeves of pale yellow and, crossed on the breast,
+a strip of black Spanish lace that fell to the hem of the skirt.
+It wasn't, of course, the clothes that attracted him--he only grew
+conscious of them perhaps a month later--but the wilful charm, the
+enigmatic fascination, of the still face. The eyes were long and half
+closed under finely arched brows, there was a minute patch at the
+right corner of a pale scarlet, smiling mouth; a pointed chin marked an
+elusive oval beneath black hair drawn down upon a long slim neck, hair
+to which was pinned an odd headdress of old gilt with, at the back,
+pendent ornamental strands of gold-glass beads.
+
+Insistently conventional, selectly ordinary, in appearance, the stick
+with a pig-skin handle hanging from his left arm, he had studied the
+doll with a deepening interest. Never in life, he told himself, had he
+seen a woman with such a magnetic and disturbing charm. Fixed in intent
+regard he became conscious that, strangely, rather than small the figure
+seemed diminished by a distance which yet left every feature clear.
+With this he grew satirical at himself; and, moving resolutely down
+the Avenue, treated his absorption with ridicule. But the vision of the
+face, the smile, the narrowed eyes, persisted in his mind; the truth
+was that they troubled him; and within three blocks he had turned. The
+second view intensified rather than lessened his feeling, and he walked
+quickly into the shop odorous with burned sugar. The doll was removed
+from the window--it had come from Paris, he learned--and, after a
+single covert glance, he bought it, for, he needlessly informed the girl
+wrapping it in an unwieldy light package, his daughter.
+
+To his secret satisfaction, Helena, who was twelve, hadn't been strongly
+prepossessed; and the doll--though Lee Randon no longer thought of it
+as merely that--left downstairs, had been finally placed on the white
+over-mantel of the fireplace by the dining-room door.
+
+There, when he was alone, he very often stopped to gaze at the figure;
+and, during such a moment of speculative abstraction, he had, from the
+memories of early reading, called her Cytherea. That, Lee remembered
+vaguely, was the Cytheranian name of the mysterious goddess of love,
+Venus, of the principle, the passion, of life stirring in plants and
+men. But in the shape above him it had been strangely modified from an
+apparently original purpose, made infinitely difficult if not impossible
+of understanding. His Cytherea bore the traces, the results, of old and
+lost and polished civilizations; there was about her even a breath of
+immemorial China. It mingled with a suggestion of Venice, the eighteenth
+century Venice of the princes of Naxos--how curiously she brought back
+tags of discarded reading!--and of the rococo Viennese court. This much
+he grasped; but the secret of her fascination, of what, at heart, she
+represented, what in her had happened to love, entirely escaped him.
+
+Lee was interested in this, he reassured his normal intelligence,
+because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life with
+Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the tyranny
+of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without answer
+by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly entered into
+him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, everyone, that was, who
+had a trace of imagination. Existence had been enormously upset, in
+a manner at once incalculable and clear, by the late war. Why, for
+example, the present spirit of restlessness should particularly affect
+the relation of men and women he couldn't begin to grasp. Not, he added
+immediately, again, that it had clouded or shaken his happiness.
+
+It had only given him the desire, the safe necessity, to comprehend the
+powerful emotion that held Fanny and him secure against any accident
+to their love. To their love! The repetition, against his contrary
+intention, took on the accent of a challenge. However, he proceeded
+mentally, it wasn't the unassailable fact that was challenged, but the
+indefinable word love. Admiration, affection, passion, were clear in
+their meanings--but love! His brow contracted in a frown spreading in a
+shadowy doubt over his face when he saw that he had almost reached the
+clubhouse; its long steep-pitched bulk lay directly across the path of
+dusk, approaching from the east; and a ruddy flicker in the glass doors
+on the veranda showed that a fire had been lighted. To his left, down
+over the dead sod and beyond a road, he could see the broad low façade
+of his house with its terraced lawn and aged stripped maples. There,
+too, a window was bright on the first floor: probably Fanny was hearing
+the children's lessons.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+That cheerful interior he completely visualized: Fanny, in the nicest
+possible attire, sitting in the curly-maple rocking-chair, her slippered
+feet--she had a premonition of rheumatism--elevated on the collapsible
+stool she carried about with her; and Helena and Gregory hanging on
+her knees. Gregory, of course, had tomorrow's task easily in hand, with
+another star for a day's good conduct in school; but Helena, shining
+in the gold and flush of her radiant inattention, would know nothing.
+Helena, Lee Randon acknowledged, spelled atrociously. If it weren't for
+the clubs and his spiked shoes he'd turn and go home directly, himself
+supervise the children's efforts at education. But Fanny did it much
+better than he; Helena and Gregory were closer to her; while they
+volunteered endless personal and trivial admissions to her, he had to
+ask them, detail by detail, what they were doing.
+
+After he had changed his shoes and secured the latticed steel door of
+his locker he went up to the main room of the clubhouse, where, on the
+long divan before the open fire, he found Peyton Morris lounging with
+Anette Sherwin by a low tea table. The hot water, they informed Lee
+comfortably, was cold, inviting him by implication to ring for more; and
+then they returned to the conversation he had interrupted. Anette said:
+
+"I asked her from Friday till Monday, over the dance, you see; but she
+wired she couldn't be sure. They are going to begin rehearsing at any
+minute, and then shoot--it is shoot, isn't it?--the picture. What did
+she tell you at the Plaza?"
+
+"The same thing," Peyton replied moodily. "I only saw her for a scrappy
+dinner; she couldn't even wait for coffee, but rushed up to a conference
+with her director."
+
+They were, Lee knew, talking about Mina Raff, a friend of Anette's
+earlier summers by the sea who was beginning to be highly successful in
+the more serious moving pictures. He had met her a number of years ago,
+in Eastlake, but he retained no clear impression of her; and, admitting
+that he hadn't gone to see her in a picture, wondered aloud at her
+sudden fame. Peyton Morris glanced at him, frowning; he seemed at the
+point of vigorous speech, then said nothing.
+
+"Mina is lovely now, Lee," Anette spoke in his place; "you will realize
+that at once. She's like a--a wistful April moon, or corn silk."
+
+"I like black hair," Randon asserted.
+
+"That's amusing, when you think Fanny's is quite brown," Anette replied.
+"Whom have you been meeting with black hair? There's none I can remember
+in Eastlake."
+
+"There isn't anybody in particular," Lee reassured her; "it is just
+an idea of mine." He had a vision of intense black hair swept about an
+enigmatic still smile, of an old gilt headdress. "Mina Raff must have
+developed if she gets half the pay advertised."
+
+"She'll get twice that when this contract expires," Peyton put in; "and
+that will be increased again. No one on the screen can touch her." He
+made these declarations in a manner both shadowed and aggressive. Lee
+observed that he held a cigarette in one hand and a match in the other
+with no effort at conjunction.
+
+"Mina simply tells you everything," Anette continued. "If she comes you
+must do your best. It's perfectly marvelous, with so much else, that she
+even considers it. I couldn't budge her when she was practically free."
+
+"How is Claire?" Randon abruptly demanded.
+
+"She's all right," her husband returned; "a little offhand, but no more
+than usual. I want her to go to the West Indies and take Ira but she
+won't listen. Why anyone who doesn't have to stay through these rotten
+winters I can't imagine." A flaming log brought out his handsomely
+proportioned face, the clear grey eyes, the light carefully brushed hair
+and stubborn chin. Peyton was a striking if slightly sullen appearing
+youth--yet he must be on the mark of thirty--and it was undeniable that
+he was well thought of generally. At his university, Princeton, he had
+belonged to a most select club; his family, his prospects, even
+his present--junior partner in a young but successful firm of bond
+brokers--were beyond reproach. Yet Lee Randon was aware that he had
+never completely liked Peyton.
+
+His exterior was too hard, too obviously certain, to allow any
+penetration of the inevitable human and personal irregularities beneath.
+It might be possible that he was all of a piece of the conventional
+stereotyped proprieties; but Lee couldn't imagine Claire marrying or
+holding to a man so empty, or, rather, so dully solid. Claire he admired
+without reservation--a girl who had become a wife, a mother, with no
+loss of her vivid character. Her attitude toward Ira, now four years
+old--wholly different from Fanny's manner with her children--was lightly
+humorous; publicly she treated her obligations as jokes; but actually,
+Lee knew, she was indefatigable.
+
+This was a type of high spirits, of highly bred courage, to which he was
+entirely delivered. Fanny was a perfect mother, a remarkably fine wife,
+but she bore an evident sense of her responsibilities. She wasn't so
+good-looking as Claire, who at times was almost beautiful; but Fanny had
+a very decided kind of attractiveness which Lee Randon wished she would
+more bring out. She was a little too serious. He didn't actually
+want her to drink and swear in public, that wouldn't become her; but
+something of that sort, he felt, might help her. At times, when she had
+had more than her customary cocktail and a half, he saw in her a promise
+of what he desired.
+
+God knew he wasn't criticizing Fanny, he hastened to reassure even
+himself: how could he, in the face of all she had brought him--the
+freedom of money and undeviating devotion and their two splendid
+children? His house was as absolute in its restrained luxury of taste
+as was the unfailing attention to his comfort. It was purely for her
+own happiness that he wanted her to be, well--a little gayer. She was
+already developing a tendency to sit serenely on the veranda of the club
+through the dances, to encourage others rather than take an active part
+herself.
+
+Expanding in the glow of the fire and hot strong tea he forgot all about
+his uncomfortable premonitions of age. Now it seemed to him that he had
+never been younger in the sense of being merely alive; after the tonic
+of the cold his nerves were strung like steel, his blood was in a full
+tide. Lee was aware of a marked sense of pleasure at the closeness to
+him of Anette; settling back, she willingly, voluntarily, leaned her
+firm elastic body against him; her legs, as evident in woolen stockings
+as his own, were thrust frankly out toward the flames.
+
+"I'll meet her," he heard Peyton say, and realized that they were still
+talking about Mina Raff. She wouldn't attract him, Lee Randon, in the
+least, he was sure of that ... no wistful April moon. What, then, did
+engage him? He was unable to say, he didn't know. It was something
+intangible, a charm without definite form; and his thoughts returned to
+Cytherea--if he could grasp the secret of her fascination he would be
+able to settle a great many disturbing feelings and needs. Yes, what
+she mutely expressed was what, beneath his comprehension, he had come
+to long for. He had never recognized it as the property of any woman nor
+satisfied it in himself.
+
+Here, certainly, his loyalty, his affection for Fanny, weren't damaged;
+he was, he thought, beyond assault there. It was only that, together
+with his fidelity to his wife, an increasing uneasiness possessed him,
+an unabated separate interest in life, in women. He was searching for
+something essential, he couldn't discover what; but, dismissing the
+problem of how he'd act if he found it, the profound conviction remained
+that when his hopeful quest was over then indeed he'd be old, finished,
+drained. Lee Randon secretly cherished, jealously guarded, that
+restless, vital reaching for the indefinable perfection of his hidden
+desire. For a flash it was almost perceptible in Anette, her head
+half-buried in the darkness of the divan behind the rise and fall of her
+breasts in a close sweater of Jaeger wool.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+She stirred, smiled at him absently, and, with Peyton's assistance,
+rose. The long room, unlighted except for the fire, was lost in
+obscurity; the blackness against the window-panes was absolute. Outside,
+however, Lee found a lingering glint of day; the snow had stopped, but
+the wind had increased and was blowing over the open expanse of the
+course in the high gaunt key of winter. His house, across the road,
+showed regular cheerful rectangles of orange illumination: he always
+returned to it with a feeling of relief and pleasant anticipation, but
+he was very far from sharing Fanny's passionate attachment to their
+home. Away--on past trips to the Michigan iron ore fields and now on
+shorter journeys to eastern financial centers--he never thought of it,
+he was absorbed by business.
+
+But in that he wasn't alone, it was true of the majority of successful
+men he knew over forty; they saw their wives, their homes, they
+thought of their families, only in the intervals of their tyrannical
+occupations. He, in reality, was rather better there than most, for
+he occasionally stayed out at Eastlake to play golf; he was locally
+interested, active, in the small town of Fanny's birth. Other men--
+
+He made a calculation of how much time a practising lawyer saw his wife:
+certainly he was out of the house before nine--Lee knew lawyers who were
+in their offices at seven-thirty--and he was hardly back until after
+five. Nine hours absent daily through the week; and it was probable that
+he was in bed by eleven, up at seven--seven hours' sleep; of the eight
+hours left in twenty-four half if not two-thirds of the Sundays and
+some part of the others were devoted to a recreation; and this took no
+account of the briefcases brought home, the thought and contributary
+preoccupations.
+
+More than that, his mind, his hopes and planning, were constantly
+directed toward his legal concerns; the wife of such a man filled about
+the position of his golf or billiards. Lee Randon had never analyzed
+this before, and the result amazed him. With younger men, of course, it
+was different; they had more time and interest for their homes, their
+wives and children. Everything constantly shifted, changed, perished;
+all, that was, but the unintelligible spurring need beyond any
+accomplishment.
+
+In him it was almost as though there were--or, perhaps, had been--two
+distinct, opposed processes of thought, two different personalities, a
+fact still admirably illustrated by his private interest in the doll,
+in Cytherea. Much younger he had been fond of music, of opera and then
+symphony concerts, and his university years had been devoted to a wide
+indiscriminate reading: sitting until morning with college men of poetic
+tendencies, he had discussed the intricacies of conduct in the light of
+beauty rather than prudence. This followed him shyly into the world,
+the offices of the Magnolia Iron Works; where, he had told himself
+optimistically, he was but finding a temporary competence. What, when
+he should be free to follow his inclination, he'd do, Lee never
+particularized; it was in the clouds nebulous and bright, and
+accompanied by music. His dream left him imperceptibly, its vagueness
+killed partly by the superior reality of pig iron and ore and partly
+because he never had anyone with whom to talk it over; he could find no
+sympathy to keep it alive.
+
+That it wasn't very robust was evident; and yet, throughout his youth,
+it had been his main source of incentive. No one, in the Magnolia works,
+knew the difference between the Glucks, Alma and Christopher, nor read
+anything but the most current of magazines. At intervals Lee had found
+a woman who responded to the inner side of him, and together they swept
+into an aesthetic emotional debauch; but they came inevitably, in the
+surrounding ugliness of thought and ascribed motives, to humiliating
+and ugly ends; and he drifted with increasing rapidity to his present
+financial and material sanity.
+
+What remained of the other was hardly more than a rare accelerated
+heart-beat at a chord of music like the memory of a lost happiness, or
+at the sea shimmering with morning. He never spoke of it now, not
+even to Fanny; although it was possible that he might be doing her
+understanding an injustice. Fanny, generally, was a woman in whom the
+best of sense triumphed; Fanny was practical. It was she who saw that
+the furnace pipes were inspected, the chimney flues cleaned before
+winter; and who had the tomato frames properly laid away in the
+stable. Problems of drainage, of controversies with the neighbors, were
+instinctively brought to her, and she met and disposed of them with an
+unfailing vigorous good judgment.
+
+A remarkable companion, he told himself; he had been a fortunate
+man. She was at once conventional and an individual: Fanny never, for
+example, wore the underclothes of colored crepe de chines, the elaborate
+trifles, Lee saw in the shop windows, nightgowns of sheer exposure and
+candy-like ribbons; hers were always of fine white cambric, scalloped,
+perhaps, or with chaste embroidery, but nothing more. Neither did she
+use perfumes of any sort, there was no array of ornamental bottles on
+her dressing-table, no sachet among her handkerchiefs, her cambric was
+not laid in scented flannel. Her dressing, a little severe, perhaps--she
+liked tailored suits with crisp linen waists and blue serge with no more
+than a touch of color--was otherwise faultless in choice and order; and,
+it might be that she was wholly wise: Fanny was thin and, for a woman,
+tall, with square erectly held shoulders. Her face was thin, too, almost
+bony, and that magnified, emphasized, the open bright blueness of her
+eyes; all her spirit, her integrity and beauty, were gathered in them;
+her hair was pale and quite scanty.
+
+Yes, Fanny's eyes were her principal attraction, they were forever
+startling, contrasted with the rest, not only remarkable in shade
+but, as well, in light; in her quick unreasoning tempers, the only
+perceptible flaw of her character, they sparkled with brilliancy.
+The tempers, Lee decided, descending the narrow stony road from
+the club-house to his gate, were an unavoidable part of her special
+qualities: her quick decisiveness, her sharp recognitions of right
+and her obdurate condemnation of wrong--these distinctions were never
+obscured in Fanny--necessitated a finality of judgment open to anger
+at any contrary position. Aside from that she was as secure, as
+predictable, as any heavenly orbit; her love for him, beginning before
+marriage, had quietly and constantly increased; her usual mood was
+moulded to his need; nothing had ever contested the supremacy of his
+place with her.
+
+Lee swung open the white wicket that broke the middle of his border
+hedge and went up the path over the broad lawn; the house, an admirable
+copy of locally colonial dwellings, was a yellow stucco, with a porch on
+his left and the dining-room at the extreme right. Beyond the porch was
+the square of the formal garden, indistinguishable at this season, and
+the garage, the driveway, were hidden at the back. He mounted the broad
+steps of field stone at the terrace, but, in place of going directly
+in under the main portico, turned aside to the porch, past the dim bare
+forms of the old maples. Just as he had anticipated, the glass door
+showed him Fanny sitting in the maple slatted-back rocking-chair;
+Gregory, in blue, was present, but Helena not to be seen.
+
+His wife's hands were lying idly in her lap, and she was gazing into
+nothingness with an expression he had never before noticed, there was
+a faint troubled doubt on her brow, a questioning expression about her
+eyes. As he stood momentarily quiet he saw her hands slowly clasp until
+he felt that they were rigid, and her mouth became pinched; her face
+seemed actually hard. Gregory spoke to her, with his fat fingers on her
+sleeve, but she made no reply, paid no attention to him. Lee could hear
+Gregory's demanding voice; and then, gathering herself, Fanny sighed
+deeply and smiled at her boy. She was wearing her pearls, her rings
+sparkled in glittering prisms; and, as he opened the door, Lee Randon
+wondered if he had forgotten an engagement to go out for dinner?
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+He asked at once if this were so, but found that they were staying at
+home. She regarded him still, he realized, a little withdrawn in
+the abstraction he had surprised. This, because it was so uncommon,
+disturbed him, and he demanded what was worrying her.
+
+"Nothing, really. What made you suppose I was bothered?" Her reply was
+instinctive; and then, after a pause, she continued, more insecurely, "I
+was only thinking about some things.... Lee," she inquired, "you love me
+very much, don't you?"
+
+"Why, of course," he spoke almost impatiently.
+
+"That is all I have, you see," she admitted; "and that was what was in
+my mind. The other women I know are so different; they seem to have so
+many more interests than I, and to care less for them than I do for my
+one. It is exactly as though I belonged before the war and they came
+afterwards. It is true--I am old-fashioned. Well, I don't care if you
+don't! But, just the same, it's a problem; I don't want to be out of the
+times or narrow; and yet I can't, I don't know how, and I honestly don't
+want to, change.
+
+"It wouldn't be any better if I smoked more cigarettes or drank more
+gin, that would be silly." Lee was startled by the similarity of her
+words to his unformed thought. "No one likes fun better than I do, but
+the fun now is so different," her voice had the sound of a wail, "it's
+nothing but legs and getting kissed by anybody but your husband. I don't
+want other men to kiss me, Lee, only you. And I want you to be glad
+about that, to care for it more than anything else. You do, don't you?"
+
+Again she hesitated, and again he assured her, in a species of
+annoyance, of his feeling.
+
+"It's because I adore you," Fanny insisted; "it may be awfully foolish
+and ark-like to say, but you're all I want, absolutely." Her manner grew
+indignant. "Some women at tea today laughed at me. They did nothing but
+describe how they held their husbands' affections; actually that, as
+though it were difficult, necessary; the details were sickening, and
+reminded me of that old joke about leaving off your wedding ring. It
+was all too horrid! And, underneath, they were bitter and vindictive,
+yes--they were uneasy, afraid of something, of somebody, and treated
+every good-looking woman as a dangerous enemy. I couldn't live like
+that, I'd rather die: I told them they didn't trust the men they were
+married to."
+
+"What did they say to that?" Lee asked, standing in the door.
+
+"Agreed with me. Alice Lucian said I was damned well right she didn't
+trust hers. She loved him, too, but she didn't propose to take any
+liberties with the sanctity of her bed. They all thought Claire was a
+fool to let Peyton see Mina Raff like that in New York--the way to avoid
+trouble was to make sure it couldn't begin. Has Peyton said anything
+to you about Mina Raff? She is perfectly stunning, of course, and an
+actress."
+
+"Not to me," Lee told her; then he recalled the prolonged attention to
+Mina Raff on the divan at the Club. "What if he is crazy about her?" he
+observed indifferently; "it can't come to anything. It won't hurt Claire
+if Peyton sits out a few dances with a public idol."
+
+"I shouldn't think so either, but the others were so positive. I just
+told them how happy we are together and how devoted you are--fifteen
+marvelous years, Lee. It was plain that they envied us." She rose and
+came close to him, her widely-opened candid blue eyes level with his
+gaze. "Not the slightest atom must ever come between us," she said; "I
+couldn't stand it, I've been spoiled. I won't have to, will I, Lee? Lee,
+kiss me."
+
+He met the clinging thin passionate purity of her mouth. "No, certainly
+not, never," he muttered, extraordinarily stirred. He asserted to
+himself that he would make no such fatal mistake. The other, the errant
+fancy, was no more than a vagrant unimportant impulse. "Don't let these
+women, who cat around, upset you; probably they are thinking not so much
+about their husbands as they are of themselves. I've seen that Alice
+Lucian parked out in a limousine during a dance, and she was going right
+to it."
+
+"It is foolish of me," Fanny agreed, "and not complimentary to our love.
+I have kept you so long over nothing that you will be late for dinner.
+I don't care!" Her manner bore a foreign trace of abandon in its radiant
+happiness; and, with spread fingers on his back, she propelled him
+toward the stairs. But, in their room, he failed to change his clothes:
+he sat lost in a concentration of thought, of summoned determination.
+
+The interior, with dotted white Swiss curtains at the large windows,
+both an anomaly and an improvement on the architectural origin, was
+furnished largely in dull rubbed mahogany, the beds had high slender
+fluted posts, snowy ruffled canopies and counterpanes stitched in a
+primitive design. He possessed an inlaid chest of drawers across from
+the graceful low-boy used by Fanny as a dressing-table; there was a bed
+stand with brass-tipped feet, a Duncan Fyfe, she declared; split hickory
+chairs painted a dark claret color; small hooked rugs on the waxed
+floor; and, against the mirror on his chest of drawers, a big photograph
+of Fanny and the two children in the window-seat of the living room.
+
+A dinner shirt lay in readiness on the bed, the red morocco boxes that
+held his moonstone cuff links and studs were evident, but he ignored
+those provisions for his ease. There was a strange, a different and
+unaccountable, uneasiness, a marked discomfort, at his heart. The burden
+of it was that he had a very great deal of which, it might well be, he
+wasn't worthy. In Fanny, he told himself, as against everything else
+discoverable, he had the utmost priceless security life could offer.
+Outside the brightness and warmth and charm of their house the November
+night was slashed by a black homeless wind.
+
+Her sureness, undeniably, was founded on the inalterable strength of
+her convictions; against that sustaining power, it occurred to him, the
+correctness of her beliefs might be relatively unimportant. Could any
+more be required of a faith than its ability, like a life preserver on
+water, to hold an individual safe from sinking? Strangely enough, the
+one or two greatly powerful men with whom he had come in contact were
+like Fanny, prejudiced, closed against all opinions contrary to their
+own, impatient of doubt and self-questioning.
+
+Fanny, Lee Randon recognized, was indefatigable in her efforts to form
+him in her own unassailable mould; she insisted in the most trivial, and
+often tiresome, ways, that he should reach and maintain her standards.
+He had been in return, more often than not, rebellious, humorously or
+with a suspicion of annoyance; but now, suddenly, it seemed to him that
+just that, the limitation of Fanny's determined attitude, was, perhaps,
+the most desirable thing possible. If it were possible of acquisition!
+Such a certainty wasn't his naturally--those two diverse strains in him
+again; but one, he added, had been practically obliterated. The first
+step in such a course of practical wisdom would be to put Cytherea out
+of his life, dislodge her finally from his thoughts, and the over-mantel
+downstairs. This, diplomatically with the doll, he could, of course,
+do now, whenever he chose. With that, and whatever it represented,
+accomplished, Lee had a premonition, his life would be secure, placid.
+
+The disturbance caused by Fanny's searching tenderness subsided a
+little; and, as it dwindled, the other restlessness, the sense, yes--of
+wasted possibilities and years, once more grew evident. By God, if Fanny
+insisted on being, at any cost, herself, it would be unreasonable in her
+not to recognize the same need in him. But Lee was obliged to add the
+old and familiar and increasingly heavy provision: any individuality of
+being, of desire, must not be allowed to impair the validity of their
+common existence, their marriage. Fanny had an advantage over him there,
+for all her aspirations turned inward to their love, their home and
+children; and his ... but if he knew their goal he could have beaten
+life.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Footfalls approaching over the hall--the maid to tell him dinner was
+served--brought him sharply to his feet, and he hurried down to where
+Fanny, who liked to do such things, had finished lighting the candles on
+the table. In reply to the glance of interrogation at his inappropriate
+clothes he explained that, trivially occupied, he had been unaware of
+the flight of time. Throughout dinner Fanny and he said little; their
+children had a supper at six o'clock, and at seven were sent to bed;
+so there were commonly but two at the other table. He had an occasional
+glimpse of his wife, behind a high centerpiece of late chrysanthemums,
+the color of bright copper pennies and hardly larger; and he was struck,
+as he was so often, by Fanny's youthful appearance; but that wasn't,
+he decided, so much because of her actual person--although since her
+marriage she had shown practically no change--as from a spirit of
+rigorous purity; she was, in spite of everything, Lee realized,
+completely virginal in mind.
+
+The way she sat and walked, with her elbows close to her body and her
+high square shoulders carried forward, gave her an air of eagerness, of
+youthful hurry. Perhaps she grew more easily tired now than formerly;
+her face then seemed thinner than ever, the temples sunken and
+cheek-bones evident, and her eyes startling in their size and blueness
+and prominence. She kept, too, the almost shrinking delicacy of a girl's
+mind: Fanny never repeated stories not sufficiently saved from the gross
+by their humor. Her private severity with women who did, he felt, was
+too extreme. The truth was that she regarded the mechanism of nature
+with distaste; Fanny was never lost, never abandoned, in passion--Lee
+Randon had wondered if she regarded that as more than a duty, the
+discharge of a moral, if not actually a religious, obligation. It was
+certain that she was clothed in a sense of bodily shame, of instinctive
+extreme modesty, which no situation or degree of feeling could destroy.
+
+He understood, however, that he could not have Fanny as she was,
+immeasurably fine, without accepting all the implications of her
+character--other qualities, which he might desire, would as well bring
+their defects. Lee didn't for a second want a wife like Anette. His
+admiration for Fanny was, fundamentally, enormous. He was glad that
+there was nothing hidden in his life which could seriously disturb her;
+nothing, that was, irrevocable. Which had he been--wise or fortunate, or
+only trivial? Perhaps, everything considered, merely fortunate; and
+he wondered how she would have met an infidelity of his? He put his
+question in the past tense because now, Lee congratulated himself, all
+the danger was passed: forty-seven, with responsibilities that increased
+every month in importance, and swiftly growing children; the hair above
+his ears was patched with grey.
+
+"I don't like that centerpiece," Fanny observed, "I can't see you.
+Still, it's as well, I suppose, since you didn't change. You look so
+much better in dark clothes, Lee, thinner."
+
+"You shouldn't make me so comfortable."
+
+"You'd see to that, anyhow; men always do. Honestly, Alice Lucian was a
+scream this afternoon, she said that she hated and distrusted all men;
+yet I'm sure no one could be more considerate or dependable than Warner.
+Now, if she had a husband like George Willard--"
+
+"What would you do," Lee asked, "if I spent my spare time with the very
+young ones?"
+
+"I'd have a doctor see you," she replied coolly. "What in the world put
+that in your head? Haven't you everything here a man could want? That's
+exactly what they were talking about; it's so--so idiotic. Those
+younger girls ought to be smacked and put to bed, with their one-piece
+swimming-suits and shimmying. They give a very misleading impression."
+
+He lost the course of her speech in considering how little of themselves
+women, old and young, showed each other. If Fanny meant, if she for a
+moment thought, where the girls they were discussing came in, that there
+was smoke without fire.... It was all devilish strange, the present day,
+disturbing. The young men, since the war, had grown sober, and the
+older men resembled George Willard. The exploding of so much powder, the
+release of such naked passions, had over-thrown the balance of conduct
+and pressure. How fortunate, he thought again, he was in having Fanny.
+
+They moved into the enclosure by the fire-place, where Cytherea was
+remote in shadow against the chimney, and through the hall to the living
+room for coffee. His wife placed the portable stool under her feet, and
+silence enveloped them. At intervals the clear treble of the children's
+voices was audible from above, and once Fanny called up for them to be
+quiet. The room was large, it filled that end of the lower floor, and
+Lee's gaze idly rested on the smoke of his cigar, veiling the grand
+piano in the far corner. There were no overhead lights, the plugs for
+the lamps were set in the baseboard, and the radiance was pleasantly
+diffused, warm and subdued: the dull immaculately white paint of the
+bookshelves on his left, silver frames on a table, harmonious fabrics
+and spots of color, consciously and sub-consciously spread a restful
+pattern. In reply to his comment Fanny acknowledged that she had seen
+the snow; she hated winter, she proceeded, and thought that if it turned
+out as bad as last year they might get away to Cuba and see Daniel.
+
+Daniel was Lee's brother, four years his junior, an administrador of a
+sugar estancia in the Province of Camagüey; a man who, absorbed in his
+crops and his adopted Spanish-tropical civilization, rarely returned to
+the United States. This projected trip to Cuba they had discussed for
+many Novembers; every year Fanny and he promised each other that,
+early in February, they would actually go; and preparatory letters were
+exchanged with Daniel Randon; but it always came to nothing. Either
+it was impossible for Fanny to leave the children, the house, or the
+servants, or Lee's affairs were in need of close supervision.
+
+Suddenly it annoyed him to discuss again, uselessly, Camagüey; it
+had become only a vain pretence, a sustained mirage, of escape from
+disagreeable days. While it was hot in Cuba, Daniel maintained, the
+trade wind coming with evening made the nights cool; it was far more
+comfortable, summer and winter, at La Quinta than in Eastlake. Cuba,
+he made it seem, Havana and the colonias of cane, the coast and the
+interior, was a place with none of the drawbacks of a northern land or
+society; there were, certainly, conventions--the Spanish were a very
+punctilious people--but they operated in a conveniently definite, Daniel
+might almost say a sensible masculine, manner. He had not gone into
+any further detail, but had sunk into his celebrated immobility of
+expression. Lee, therefore, had drawn his own, natural, conclusions; he
+had come to regard Cuba in the same light as that of the early Castilian
+adventurers--an El Dorado, but of freedom rather than gold.
+
+A perverse restlessness settled upon him, and he put down his coffee cup
+abruptly; the contentment in his surroundings vanished. Lee wanted to
+be somewhere else, see something different, not so--so tranquil,
+so complacently delivered to the uneventful. Fanny, he told himself
+resentfully, would be satisfied to sit exactly where she was for a year.
+She met his fleet scrutiny with a faint smile. Her face wouldn't be
+greatly changed by old age, by death. She was like that, inside and out.
+Whirling ungracious fancies passed through his brain. He shook his head,
+and Fanny instantly demanded, "What is it, Lee, what is worrying you?"
+Nothing, he replied, but she continued to study him until, giving it up,
+she turned to the approaching dance; there would be a dinner at the Club
+before it, and forty people from out of town had accepted. They must all
+have a perfect time, she declared. Gregory could be heard laughing, and,
+with a sense of relief, of escape, he volunteered to go up and see what
+kept the children roused. He would only make them worse, Fanny observed,
+he was as fidgety as Helena; but her tone carried to him her compelling
+affection.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The darkened room where Helena and Gregory slept held a cold glimmering
+whiteness; and the light he switched on showed a most sanitary bareness
+and two severe iron beds. There was a moment's stillness as he entered,
+the scrutiny of two rosy faces framed in blanket and sheet--there were
+no pillows--and then there was a delighted vociferous recognition of his
+presence.
+
+"You must sit on my bed," Helena insisted.
+
+"No, mine!" Gregory cried; and, as he settled by his daughter, "For
+every minute you're there, father, you must sit here. Guess what I have
+with me." Lee Randon had no idea, and Gregory produced a willow switch.
+"That's for anybody who isn't good."
+
+There was a wriggle down under the blanket, and Lee leaned forward; "Are
+those your feet?" he demanded; "do you go that far down, are you that
+tall?"
+
+"Gracious, that's nothing," Helena cut in; "just see where I go." He
+discovered that her active toes were almost under the end bar of the
+bed. The covers were moulded by her firm body. In a few years, he
+thought with a constricted throat, Helena would be grown up, flung
+into the complex troubles of maturity. However, he knew, life wouldn't
+greatly upset her--she had a calmness more stolid than Fanny's together
+with his own sharpened sensibilities: it was probable that she would
+marry soon.
+
+Gregory was different; while Helena, in small ways, was unamenable, he
+was as good as the gold stars he continually got for admirable
+conduct. He had a deliberate, careful mind and, already, a sense of
+responsibilities. He spoke slowly, giving the impression that the
+selection of words was a heavy business; where Helena's speech came in
+careless rushes. Gregory, too, Lee Randon told himself, would not be at
+a loss later. The two children actually demanded very little from him
+now beyond the love they took for granted and its obvious return. But,
+for his part, did he give them much, indeed, any more? Was there, Lee
+wondered, a deficiency in his sense of parenthood?
+
+He knew men all of whose labor was for their children; they slaved to
+have comfortable sums against their children's futures; they schemed and
+talked, often fatuously, for and about their sons and, in lesser degree,
+daughters. They were, in short, wholly absorbed, no more than parents;
+at the advent of a family they lost individuality, ambition, initiative;
+nature trapped them, blotted them out; it used them for its great
+purpose and then cast them aside, just as corporations used men for a
+single task and dropped them when their productiveness was over.
+
+But he wasn't like that, it might well be unfortunately. His
+personality, his peculiar needs, had survived marriage; the vague
+longings of youth had not been entirely killed. They were still potent
+and still nameless; they had refused to be gathered into a definition as
+exact as ambition. Lee had moved to Gregory's bed, and was holding one
+of the small warm hands, inattentive to the eager clamor of voices.
+Perhaps his ambition had vanished when he had left the first plan of his
+future for the more tangible second: there wasn't much in the material
+industry of iron founding, nor in his present wider activities, to
+satisfy the imagination.
+
+Taking the place of that, he had an uncommon amount of energy, vitality,
+a force of some kind or other. Whatever he undertook he followed with a
+full vigorous sweep; he was successful in convincing a large proportion
+of the people with whom he dealt that their ends were the same as his;
+and here, as well, chance, fate, had been with Lee--no one, practically,
+had lost through a belief in him.
+
+His situation today, he wholly and gladly admitted, had resulted from
+the money Fanny brought him. Until his marriage he had been confined to
+the Magnolia Iron Works; of which, it was conceivable, he would in time
+be manager, maybe, much later, part owner. But, with fresh resources,
+he tried fresh fields, investments, purchases, every one of which
+prospered. He owned or operated or controlled an extraordinary diversity
+of industries--a bottling works for nonalcoholic beverages, a small
+structural steel plant, the Eastlake daily paper--a property that
+returned forty per cent on his capital--a box works, purchased before
+the war, with an output that had leaped, almost over night, from
+thousands to millions, a well-known cigarette--
+
+His energies, forever turning from routine paths and stereotyped
+preoccupations, took him vividly into countless phases of existence.
+He had accumulated nearly a million dollars and Fanny's affairs had
+benefited greatly; his administration of her money had been rigid:
+but--for whatever it was worth--his wife had, in liberating him from the
+company of the super-hot cupolas, made it all possible.
+
+A fist, now, was softly pounding him; and Gregory's voice threatened
+tears. "What is it?" Lee Randon asked. "You will have to excuse me, I
+was thinking."
+
+The narrative which followed, the confused history of a two and a half
+dollar gold-piece finally taken from Gregory by his mother, was broken
+into by Helena's irrepressible contempt at his youthfulness.
+
+"He thinks the money is gone," she explained, "because Mother put it in
+the bank for him. I told him when he got it there would be a lot more,
+but he just wouldn't listen to me. No matter what anybody said it was no
+good."
+
+"Well," Gregory inquired, "how much more?"
+
+"I don't know, silly; but packs."
+
+"Seventy-seven dollars?"
+
+"That depends on how long you leave it in the bank," Lee instructed him.
+"If you didn't ask for it for twenty years--"
+
+"But I want it next Thursday," Gregory hotly interrupted; "won't it be
+any bigger then?"
+
+"He does nothing but ask and ask questions," Helena added. Lee patted
+Gregory's cheek:
+
+"Don't let Helena discourage you. If I don't put the light out your
+mother will make me go to bed."
+
+There were breathless delighted giggles at the thought of that
+absurdity. He leaned over his son. "Kiss me!" Helena cried. "Now kiss
+me," Gregory echoed. "Kiss me back again--"
+
+The light went out with a sharp click, and the room was once more a
+glimmering darkness, blanched and cold. The ruddy faces of the children,
+their bright hair, even their voices, were subdued. Fanny, apparently,
+hadn't moved; the light at her shoulder was reflected in the cut
+steel buckles of her slippers; she had slight but graceful ankles. He
+recognized this, drawing a sheaf of reports from his brief-case; but,
+after a perfunctory glance, he dropped them beside him on the floor.
+
+"Really, Lee, your condition is getting dreadful," Fanny observed; "you
+are too nervous for words. Go in and look at that doll you brought
+from New York. She ought to teach you repose even if I can't." A swift
+concern shadowed her eyes. "Are you doing too much, do you think? It
+isn't necessary, you know. We have plenty. I don't understand why you
+will go so hard at all those fool concerns of yours. There might be a
+mortgage on us, from the way you work."
+
+The latter part of her speech he forgot in the calling of his attention
+to Cytherea. Fanny had said that the doll might tranquilize him. The
+opposite was more probable--Cytherea, what could be more disturbing?
+Fanny hadn't noticed her smile, the long half-closed eyes, the
+expression of malicious tenderness, if such a thing were possible, the
+pale seductiveness of her wrists and hands, the finger nails
+stained with vermilion. He tried to imagine a woman like that, warm,
+no--burning, with life. It seemed to Lee the doll became animated in a
+whisper of cool silk, but he couldn't invent a place, a society, into
+which she fitted. Not Eastlake, certainly, nor New York ... perhaps
+Cuba. What a vanity of nonsense his thoughts had led him back into:
+Cytherea, a thing of wax, was on the over-mantel beyond the hall; Cuba
+beyond the sea.
+
+The smoke of another cigar, precisely in the manner of the one before,
+hung between him and the piano. His wife settled contentedly in the
+curly maple rocker, her rings flashing in the swift drawing of threads
+from a square of linen.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Early in the morning Lee Randon drove himself, in a Ford sedan, to a
+station on the main line of a railway which bore him into the city and
+his office. It was nine miles from Eastlake to the station, where he
+left the car for his return; and, under ordinary circumstances, he
+accomplished the distance in twenty minutes. The road was good and lay
+through open rolling country, grazing and farmed land; he knew its every
+aspect thoroughly, each hill and turning and old stone house, in the
+pale green of early spring with the flushed petals of the apple blossoms
+falling on the dark ploughed ground; yellow with grain; a sweeping
+stubble with the corn shocked in which rabbit hunters, brown like the
+sheaves, called to their dogs.
+
+Now it was sombre and, in the morning and evening, wrapped in blue mist;
+the air had the thick damp coldness usually precipitated in snow; the
+cattle, gathered about the fodder spread in the fields, were huddled
+against the rising winds. The smoke of a chimney was flattened on a
+low roof; and Lee, who had sometimes wished that he were a part of the
+measured countryside life, had a sudden feeling of revolt from such
+binding circumstances. He wasn't surprised, this morning, that it was
+difficult to get men to work in the comparative loneliness of the farms,
+or that farmers' sons went continually to the cities.
+
+When they couldn't get there they crowded into their borough towns, into
+Eastlake, at every opportunity, attracted by the gaiety, the lights, the
+stir, the contact with humanity. Before prohibition they had drunk at
+the hotel bars, and driven home, with discordant laughter and the urged
+clatter of hoofs, to the silence of star-lit fields. The buggies had
+gone; High Street, on Saturday night, was filled with automobiles;
+there was practically no drunkenness; but there was no lessening in the
+restless seeking stream of men, the curiosity of the women with folded
+hands and tightly folded lips.
+
+They all wanted a mitigation of a life which, fundamentally, did not
+fill them; they had an absorbing labor, love and home and children,
+the church, yet they were unsatisfied. They were discontented with
+the primary facts of existence, the serious phases, and wanted, above
+everything, tinsel and laughter. If a girl passing on the street smiled
+boldly at such youths they were fired with triumph and happiness; they
+nudged each other violently and made brazen declarations which, faced by
+the girls, escaped in disconcerted laughter. Their language--and this,
+too, was a revolt--was like the sweepings of the cow barns.
+
+Life, it occurred to Lee Randon, in this connection, was amazingly
+muddled; and he wondered what would happen if the restraint, since it
+was no better than sham, should be swept away, and men acknowledged what
+they so largely were? A fresh standard, a new set of values, would have
+to be established. But before that could be accomplished an underlying
+motive must be discovered. That he searched for in himself; suppose he
+were absolutely free, not tomorrow, that evening, but now--
+
+Would he go to the office, to the affairs of the Zenith cigarette, and,
+once there, would he come home again--the four thirty-seven train and
+the Ford in the shed by the station? Lee couldn't answer this finally. A
+road led over the hills on the right, beyond a horizon of trees. He knew
+it for only a short distance; where ultimately it led he had no idea.
+But it was an enticing way, and he had an idiotic impulse to turn aside,
+follow it, and never come back any more. Actually he almost cut in, and
+he had to swing the car sharply to the left.
+
+If he had been in trouble or debt, if his life had been a failure, he
+would have understood his impulse; but as it was, with Fanny and Helena
+and Gregory, all his flourishing affairs--why, it was insanity! However,
+what absorbed him in his present state of mind, of inquiry, was its
+honesty; nothing could be served by conventional protests and
+nice sentiments. Lee had long wanted to escape from life, from the
+accumulating limiting circumstances. Or was it death he tried to avoid?
+
+What became clearest was that, of all the things which had happened to
+him, he would not, at the beginning, have deliberately chosen any. One,
+it seemed, bred by the other, had overtaken him, fastened upon him,
+while he was asleep. Lee knew a man who, because of his light strength
+and mastery of horses, had spent a prolonged youth riding in gentlemen's
+steeplechases for the great Virginia stables; a career of racing silk
+and odds and danger, of highly ornamental women and champagne, of
+paddocks and formal halls and surreptitious little ante-rooms. That he
+envied; and, recalling his safe ignominious usefulness during the war,
+he envied the young half-drunk aviators sweeping in reckless arcs above
+the fortified German cities.
+
+Or was it, again, only youth that he lamented, conscious of its slipping
+supinely from his grasp? Yet, if that were all, why was he rebellious
+about the present, the future, rather than the past? Lee Randon wasn't
+looking back in a self-indulgent melancholy. Nor was he an isolated,
+peculiar being; yes, all the men he knew had, more or less, his own
+feeling; he could think of none, even half intelligent, who was happy.
+Each had Lee's aspect of having been forced into a consummation he would
+not have selected, of something temporary, hurried, apologetic.
+
+He thought more specially of men celebrated in great industries, who
+had accumulated power beyond measure, millions almost beyond count--what
+extravagantly mad outlets they turned to! The captains of steel, of
+finance, were old, spent, before they were fifty, broken by machinery
+and strain in mid-life, by a responsibility in which they were like pig
+iron in an open hearth furnace. What man would choose to crumble, to
+find his brain paralysed, at forty-five or six? Such labor was a form
+of desperation, of drowning, forgetting, an affair at best an implied
+failure.
+
+That was the strength, the anodyne, of drink, of cocktails, that they
+spread a glittering transformation about crass reality; people danced
+at stated times, in hot crowded rooms, because life was pedestrian; they
+were sick of walking in an ugly meaningless clamor and wanted to move to
+music, to wear pearl studs and fragile slippers and floating chiffons.
+"The whole damned business is a mess," he said aloud. Then, reaching the
+city, he threw himself with a familiar vigor into the activities he had
+challenged.
+
+Returning over the familiar road, in his small closed car, he was
+quieter mentally, critical of his useless dissatisfaction; he was making
+needless trouble for himself. Small things filled his thoughts, among
+them the question of how much gin would be consumed by the cocktail
+party Fanny and he were having before the dinner dance at the Country
+Club. Peyton and Claire Morris, Anette and, if she came, Mina Raff, with
+two men, and the Lucians. Perhaps twelve in all; two quarts. The Country
+Club dances, principally made up of people who had known each other long
+and intimately, decidedly needed an impetus; society was rather dreadful
+without rum. Anette was an attractive girl; she had beautiful legs;
+but they were hardly better than Fanny's; why in the name of God was he
+captivated by Anette's casual ankles and indifferent to his wife's?
+
+Women's legs--they were even no longer hidden--were only a reasonable
+anatomical provision exactly shared by men. Why, he particularized, did
+he prefer them in silk stockings rather than bare, and in black more
+than bright colors? Anette's had never failed to excite his imagination,
+but Alice Lucian's, graceful enough, were without interest for him. How
+stupid was the spectacle of women in tights! Short bathing skirts left
+him cold, but the unexpected, the casual, the vagaries of fashion
+and the wind, were unfailingly potential. Humiliating, he thought, a
+curiosity that should be left with the fresh experience of youth; but
+it wasn't--comic opera with its choruses and the burlesque stage were
+principally the extravagances of middle age.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The orange juice and square bottles of clear gin, the array of glasses
+and ice-filled pewter pitcher in which Lee mixed his drinks, were
+standing conveniently on a table in the small reception room. Fanny,
+in a lavender dress with a very full skirt decorated with erratically
+placed pale yellow flowers, had everything in readiness. "Mina Raff
+came," she announced, as he descended the stairs. "Anette telephoned. To
+be quite frank I didn't much care whether she did or didn't. She used to
+be too stiff, too selfish, I thought; and I never liked Anette."
+
+"Nothing but prejudice, that," he replied decidedly. "Anette has a
+very good head. You have just heard stories from envious women." He was
+careful to say nothing about her legs. "I haven't found her the least
+bit out of the way; and she thinks a lot of you."
+
+"Bosh," Fanny said inattentively; "I know what she thinks of me. I am
+surprised, Lee, that you do so well, because really you are nothing
+but an impressionable old fool." She touched him affectionately on the
+cheek, "But I can take care of you and Anette too."
+
+He didn't in the slightest wish to be taken care of in the manner she
+indicated; yet there was nothing he could answer; and, at the sound of
+a motor on the drive, he turned toward the entrance at the back. It was
+the Lucians; and as he greeted them the whole small company swept into
+the house. Claire, with her narrow dark vivid face, wore diagonals of
+black and grey, with a long trailing girdle of soft blues and pinks. She
+came up at once to Lee and kissed him with a warm friendliness. "Have
+you seen Mina Raff?" she asked; "she's wonderful."
+
+As Claire spoke Lee Randon saw the woman who was becoming such a noted
+personality. She was slim, neither tall nor short--Peyton Morris was
+removing a voluminous white cloak with dull red stripes and a high
+collar of fox. He had been wrong in his remembrance of her, for her
+loveliness was beyond challenge. Yes, a wistful April moon described her
+very well: Mina Raff was ashen blonde, her face was a very pure oval,
+and her large eyes, the delicate slightly drooping mouth, held an
+expression of devastating sweetness.
+
+She came forward promptly, and yet with a little touching air of
+hesitation, and accused him, in a serious low voice, of having forgotten
+her. That, he returned, was ridiculous, an impossibility. Pictures
+of her were in all the magazines. Close by her he recognized that the
+sweetness was far from sugary; there were indications of a determination
+that reached stubbornness; already there were faint lines--skilfully
+covered--at the corners of her eyes, and she was palpably, physically,
+weary. It was that, he decided, which gave her the wistful charm. That
+and something more. She was considered, he knew, and by the judges best
+qualified, to have a very sure and perfect talent; and he had no doubt
+that that possession stamped and qualified her.
+
+He was obliged to attend to the cocktails; and, at his back, a gay
+chatter of voices rose. He had fleeting impressions of very different
+people: a strange man in naval uniform with the insignia of a commander;
+Anette in a scanty sheath of satin from which an airy skirt spread
+to the left like a fan; Alice Lucian sitting on the steps with George
+Willard: Frank Carver remote and lost in his bitter thoughts; Elsie
+Wayland with the gold halo of an income almost a dollar a minute.
+
+Mina Raff, with Peyton Morris at her shoulder, smiled at him. "What
+an adorable house," she pronounced; "I wish I could have it near the
+studio." She waved Peyton away unceremoniously, "Come, everybody has
+had enough drinks, and show it to me." They passed through the hall,
+and into the quiet of the space beyond, lighted by a single unobtrusive
+lamp. "What a satisfactory fireplace!" she exclaimed in her faint key,
+as though, Lee thought, her silent acting were depriving her of voice.
+She sank onto the cushioned bench against the partition. "How did they
+feel, do you suppose--the people, the men and women, who belonged to
+such things?" As Lee watched her it seemed that she grew more remote,
+shadowy, like a memory of long vanished beauty made before his eyes
+from the shifting firelight and immaterial shadows. Mina Raff lost her
+reality in an unreal charm that compressed his heart. The atmosphere
+around her stirred with re-created dead emotions. Then:
+
+"Ah!" she cried softly, unexpectedly, "what a wonderful doll." She rose,
+with a graceful gesture of her hands up to where Cytherea rested. "Where
+did you get her? But that doesn't matter: do you suppose, would it be
+possible for me, could I buy her?"
+
+"I'm sorry," Lee answered promptly; "we can't do without her. She
+belongs to Helena," he lied.
+
+"But not to a child," Mina Raff protested, with what, in her, was
+animation and color; "it has a wicked, irresistible beauty." She gazed
+with a sudden flash of penetration at Lee Randon. "Are you sure it's
+your daughter's?" she asked, once more repressed, negative. "Are you
+quite certain it is not yours and you are in love with it?"
+
+He laughed uncomfortably. "You seem to think I'm insane--"
+
+"No," she replied, "but you might, perhaps, be about that." Her voice
+was as impersonal as an oracle's. "You would be better off without her
+in your house; she might easily ruin it. No common infidelity could be
+half as dangerous. How blind women are--your wife would keep that about
+and yet divorce you for kissing a servant. What did you call her?"
+
+"Cytherea."
+
+"I don't know what that means."
+
+He told her, and she studied him in a brief masked appraisal. "Do you
+know," she went on, "that I get four hundred letters a week from men;
+they are put everywhere, sometimes in my bed; and last week a man killed
+himself because I wouldn't see him. You'd think that he had all a man
+wanted from life; yet, in his library, with his secretary waiting for
+him, he.... Why?" she demanded, questioning him with her subdued magic.
+
+"Have you ever cared for any of them?" he asked indirectly.
+
+"I'm not sure," she replied, with an evident honesty; "I am trying to
+make up my mind now. But I hope not, it will bring so much trouble. I
+do all I can to avoid that; I really hate to hurt people. If it happens,
+though, what can you do? Which is worse--to damage others or yourself?
+Of course, underneath I am entirely selfish; I have to be; I always was.
+Art is the most exhausting thing that is. But I don't know a great deal
+about it; other people, who act rather badly, can explain so fully."
+
+From where Lee sat he could see Cytherea; the unsteady light fell on the
+gilt headdress, the black hair and the pale disturbing smile. She seemed
+to have paused in a slow graceful walk, waiting, with that wisdom at
+once satirical and tender, for him. Together, slowly, deliberately, they
+would move away from the known, the commonplace, the bound, into the
+unknown--dark gardens and white marble and the murmur of an ultramarine
+sea. He was rudely disturbed by the entrance of Anette and Peyton
+Morris. "We're so sorry," Anette said in an exaggerated air of apology;
+"come on away, Peyton." But the latter told Lee that Fanny was looking
+for him. "We are ready to go over to the Club; it's ten minutes past
+eight."
+
+Mina Raff gazed up at the doll. "I have an idea the devil made you," she
+declared.
+
+"You are to go with us, Mina," Peyton told her; "if you will get your
+cloak--" The two women left, and Morris demanded:
+
+"What was that damned rot about the doll?"
+
+"Miss Raff wanted it."
+
+"Well, why not?"
+
+Lee Randon turned away coldly. "Little girls can't have everything they
+put their eyes on." Morris muttered, and Lee asked, "What's that?" The
+other failed to reply, but his remark had sounded remarkably like,
+"She can." Going, Lee looked back involuntarily: he hadn't, after all,
+imagined Cytherea's quality, Mina Raff had recognized it, too; the dance
+had lost its attraction for him.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The automobiles started in a concentration of accelerated gasoline
+explosions, their headlights sweeping across the house and plunging into
+the farther night. Fanny gathered her wrap closely about her throat.
+"I'm cold," she asserted; "it was so nice at home, with the children,
+and plans--I intend to take out that yellow rambler and try a climbing
+American beauty rose there. What a lovely dress of Anette's; it must
+be the one she's been talking about so much, that Miss Zillinger made;
+really good for Eastlake. What was that man's name who was in the navy,
+and did you notice his rank? The officers of the navy are a lot better
+looking than army men. And Mina Raff, after all did you find her
+interesting?"
+
+"Quite. She struck me as very intelligent." He had no wish to repeat the
+conversation about Cytherea. It was queer, that; the more he considered
+it the more significant it appeared to be. "Did it seem to you," he
+asked, "that Peyton was very attentive?"
+
+"I didn't have time to notice. Do you think it's true about her getting
+all that money? It looks almost wicked to me, with so many people
+needing just a little. But anybody could see that she thinks only of
+herself; I don't mean she isn't charitable, but in--in other ways."
+
+They were late, and the main floor was being emptied of a small crowd
+moving into the dining-room. There the long table of the club dinner
+reached from end wall to wall; and, with the scraping of chairs, a
+confusion of voices, the places were filled. Lee found himself between
+Bemis Fox, a younger girl familiar enough at the dances but whose
+presence had only just been recognized, and Mrs. Craddock, in Eastlake
+for the winter. Anette was across the board, and her lips formed the
+query, "The first dance?"
+
+Lee Randon nodded; he was measurably fond of her; he usually enjoyed a
+party at which he found Anette. That she liked him was very evident; not
+desperately, but enough to dispose of most restraint; she repeated to
+Lee what stories, formal and informal, men told her, and she asked his
+advice about situations always intimate and interesting.
+
+The flood of voices, sustained on cocktails, rose and fell, there
+were challenges down the length of the table and quickly exchanged
+confidences. Bemis, publicly ingenuous, laid a light eager hand on his
+arm, and Mrs. Craddock answered a question in a decided manner. The
+dinner, Lee saw, was wholly characteristic of the club and its members:
+they had all, practically, known each other for years, since childhood;
+meeting casually on the street, in the discharge of a common living,
+their greetings and conversation were based on mutual long familiarity
+and recognized facts; but here, at such dances, they put on, together
+with the appropriate dress, a totally other aspect.
+
+An artificial and exotic air enveloped whatever they did and said--hardy
+perennials, Lee thought, in terms Fanny's rather than his, they were
+determined to transform themselves into the delicate and rare flowers
+of a conservatory. Women to whom giggling was an anomaly giggled
+persistently; others, the perfect forms of housewife and virtue, seemed
+intent on creating the opposite engaging impression; they were all
+seriously, desperately, addressed to a necessity of being as different
+from their actual useful fates as possible.
+
+The men, with the exception of the very young and the perpetually young,
+were, Lee Randon knew, more annoyed than anything else; there was hardly
+one of them who, with opportunity, would not have avoided the dinner as
+a damned nuisance; scarcely a man would have put his stamp of approval
+on that kind of entertainment. It was the women who engineered it, the
+entire society of America, who had invented all the popular forms of
+pleasure; it was their show, for the magnifying of their charms and the
+spectacle of their gay satins and scented lace; and the men came,
+paid, with a good humor, a patience, not without its resemblance to
+imbecility. Women, Lee continued, constantly complained about living in
+a world made by men for men; but the truth of that was very limited:
+in the details, the details which, enormously multiplied, filled life,
+women were omnipotent. No man could withstand the steady friction, the
+inexhaustible wearing, of feminine prejudice; forever rolled in the
+resistless stream of women's ambition, their men became round and smooth
+and admirable, like pebbles. This, he saw, in Fanny's loving care, was
+happening to him: she had spun him into the center of a silken web--
+
+"You are not very polite," Mrs. Craddock said.
+
+"Are you a mind-reader," he replied, "or haven't I heard you?"
+
+"It doesn't matter," she explained, "but you were so far away."
+
+He told her something of what had been in his thoughts, and she rewarded
+him with a swift speculative interest. "I hadn't realized you were so
+critical about your guinea hen," she acknowledged. "Well, if what you
+say is true, what can you do about it?"
+
+"Nothing," Lee returned non-committally; "I am comfortable." This, he
+instantly decided, sounded unfair to Fanny, and he substituted happy.
+Mrs. Craddock obviously was not interested in the change. "I get as
+tired of this as you do," she asserted abruptly; "it's like being on a
+merry-go-round someone else started and can't stop. You have no idea how
+we get to hate the tunes."
+
+"But you mustn't forget the chance of catching a gold ring," he reminded
+her.
+
+"It's brass," Mrs. Craddock asserted.
+
+The orchestra began in the other room and, though dinner was not over,
+there were breaks in the table, couples dancing beyond. Anette rose, and
+Lee Randon, taking her into his arms, swept out from the doorway.
+"What was she talking about?" Anette demanded. "You," he replied
+experimentally. "I like her; experience has brought her some wisdom; and
+she knows men, too."
+
+"God knows she ought to," Anette's face was close to his, and he
+caught the flash of malice in her eyes. Conscious of the flavor of an
+acceptable flattery he didn't let this disturb him. "What a marvelous
+dance," she proceeded; "there must be twenty men over. But I like it
+better when the porch isn't inclosed, and you can sit on the bunkers."
+
+How was it that she contrived to make nearly everything she said stir
+his imagination? Anette had the art of investing the most trivial
+comments with a suggestion of license. It was a stimulating quality, but
+dangerous for her--she was past thirty with no sign of marriage on
+the horizon. He wondered if she really had thrown her slipper over the
+hedge? It wasn't important, Lee decided, if she had. How ludicrous it
+was to judge all women, weigh their character, by the single standard
+of chastity. But this much must be admitted, when that convention of
+morality was broken it had no more significance than the fragments of
+a coconut shell. The dance came to an end and they returned to their
+vanilla mousse, coffee and cigarettes.
+
+Some of the men were leaning over the table, drunk and noisy; a woman's
+laugh was shrill, senseless. Senseless! That, for Lee Randon, described
+the whole proceeding. He had looked forward to the dance with a happy
+anticipation, and, now that it was here, even before he had come, he
+was out of key with it. The efforts of the people about him to forget
+themselves were stiff and unconvincing; their attitudes were no more
+than masks held before their faces; there wasn't a genuine daring
+emotion, the courage of an admitted thrill, to be found. And then, as if
+to mock his understanding, he saw Peyton Morris with such a desperately
+white face bent over Mina Raff that he had an impulse to reprove him for
+his shameless exposure.
+
+Instead, he cut in on their dancing and carried her to the other end of
+the floor. "I don't know why you did that," she complained; "you don't
+like me. But you can dance, and with Peyton it's a little like rushing
+down a football field. There! Shall we drop the encore and go outside?
+My wrap is on a chair in the corner."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"I don't go to parties," she explained; "I am only here on Anette's
+account. That was Oscar Hammerstein's idea--he wouldn't let his
+actresses even ride in a public car; he said that mystery was a part
+of their value, and that people wouldn't pay to see them if they were
+always on the streets. Beside, I am tired all the time; you can't
+possibly know how hard I work; a hundred times harder than you, for
+instance."
+
+"I've been told that about moving pictures."
+
+"The glare of the silver-foil reflectors is unbearable," she looked up,
+with a pointed and famous effect. "But you don't like me?"
+
+"I do; aside from that, though, I'm not sure; probably because you are
+so remote and cold."
+
+"Thank God!" she replied. "You haven't stopped to think where I'd be
+if I weren't. And yet, no one, in their work, is supposed to be more
+emotional. It's funny, and I don't pretend to understand. The trouble
+with me is that I have no life of my own: ever since I was sixteen
+I've done what directors told me, for the public; it is time I had some
+private feelings."
+
+"It must be a nuisance," he agreed.
+
+Another dance began, but neither of them stirred; from where Lee sat the
+long doors were panels of shifting colors and movement. The music
+beat, fluctuated, in erratic bars. A deep unhappiness possessed him,
+an appalling loneliness that sometimes descended on him in crowds. Even
+Fanny, the thought of his children, could not banish it. Above the drum
+he thought he could hear the sibilant dissatisfaction of the throng
+striving for an eternity of youth. The glass about the porch, blotted
+with night, was icy cold, but it was hot within; the steam pipes were
+heated to their full capacity, and the women's painted and powdered
+faces were streaked--their assumption of vitality and color was running
+from them.
+
+"Hideous," Mina Raff said with a small grimace. She had the strange
+ability of catching his unexpressed thoughts and putting them into
+words. "Women," she went on, "spend all their money and half their lives
+trying to look well, and you'd suppose they would learn something, but
+they don't."
+
+"What do women dress for?" he demanded; "is it to make themselves
+seductive to men or to have other women admire and envy them?"
+
+"Both," she answered, "but mostly it's a sort of competition with men
+for the prize. I'll tell you something about us if you like--we are
+not made of sugar and spice and other pleasant bits, but only of two:
+prostitute and mother. Not, of course, separately, or in equal parts;
+some of us have more of one, others more of the other. That girl across
+the table from you is all prostitute, the married woman you were talking
+to is both, quite evenly divided; your wife is a mother, even with her
+remarkable eyes." She stopped his obvious inquiry:
+
+"I am an artist, and no one has yet discovered what that is. Do you
+remember the straw you used to get with a glass of soda water? You see,
+often I think I'm like that, a thing for bright colors to pour through.
+It's very discouraging. There is Peyton, and he'll want to dance." She
+rose, slipping out of her cloak.
+
+Lee Randon saw Fanny not far away, and he dropped into a chair beside
+her. "Well," he asked, "how is it going?"
+
+"It seems all right," she told him, with one of her engaging smiles. "I
+was surprised that you talked so long to Mina Raff; I had the idea you
+didn't like her." Women, he reflected, were uncanny. "Three women are
+just plastered up in the dressing-room," she continued; "Sophie Tane
+ruined her dress completely, and Crystal Willard has been sobbing for
+an hour. Lee, there are horrid bruises on her arm--do you think he is
+brutal?"
+
+He told her not to bother about the Willards, and then rose to get a
+chair for Claire Morris. "Peyton is simply fascinated," Claire asserted
+lightly. "This Mina ought to have something handsome for giving him such
+a splendid time. She is a lovely wench, Lee."
+
+"You have it over her like a tent, Claire," he insisted; "you're lovely
+and human both."
+
+"Thank you, darling; I'm human, fast enough, now that the drink is
+dying. I believe for the first time in my life I am ready to leave
+a dance before the last flourish of the music. Fanny, we are getting
+older; it's hideous but so. We're getting on, but our young men are
+gayer every day."
+
+Fanny Randon's smile, her expression, were secure.
+
+This made Lee restive, and, patting her hand, he left to dance with
+Alice Lucian. "When this is over," she informed him, "we'll get Anette
+and George, and go out to my car. There is a Thermos bottle of cocktails
+hidden under the seat." The girl who had sat at Lee's right was dancing
+with a tall fair-haired boy in a corner. Entirely oblivious of the rest
+of the room, they were advancing two matched steps and then retreating,
+their eyes tightly shut and cheeks together. A man fell in the middle
+of the floor, catching his partner's skirt and tearing it from the
+waistband. Everywhere the mad effort at escape!
+
+Lee Randon lost his impression of the triviality of the occasion: they
+all seemed desperately searching for that something he had lost and
+which was overwhelmingly important to him; and all the while the music
+stuttered and mocked and confused a tragic need. Or it was like a
+momentary release from deadly confinement, a respite that, by its rare
+intoxication, drove the participants into forms of incredulous cramped
+abandon. Positively, he thought, they were grasping at light, at color,
+at the commonplace sounds of a few instruments, as though they were
+incalculable treasures. Alice, when she danced, held her head back with
+eyes half closed; and suddenly, with her mouth a little parted, she,
+too, had a look of Cytherea, a flash of the withheld beauty which filled
+him with restlessness.
+
+It startled him, and, sub-consciously, his arm tightened about her. She
+responded immediately, with an accelerated breath, and the resemblance
+was gone. Greatly to his relief, a man cut in on them, and once more he
+found himself dancing with Anette. She asked him, in a murmurous warmth,
+if he liked her, at all. And, with a new and surprising, a distasteful,
+sense of lying, he replied that he did, tremendously. No, a feeling in
+him, automatic and strange, responded--not Anette! He wanted to leave
+her, to leave everyone here, and go. For what? At the same time he
+realized that he would stay, and go out, drink, in the Lucians' car. He
+had a haunting impression, familiar to him in the past weeks, that he
+was betraying an essential quality of his being.
+
+Yet along with this his other consciousness, his interest in Anette,
+lingered; it existed in him tangibly, a thing of the flesh, not to be
+denied. She was all prostitute, Mina Raff had said, using the word in
+a general sense rather than particularly, without an obvious condemning
+morality. Indeed, it might easily be converted into a term of praise,
+for what, necessarily, it described was the incentive that forever drove
+men out to difficult accomplishment, to anything rather than ease. Good
+or bad, bad or good--which, such magic or maternity, was which?
+
+"What are you thinking about?"
+
+"It would take years to tell you."
+
+"I wish ... you might; but I didn't mean to say that, to let you know--"
+
+"You didn't let me know anything," he broke into her period impatiently.
+"If we get on together isn't that enough? It's really not necessary
+to hide ourselves behind a lot of pretentious words. And what we feel
+tonight hasn't a thing to do with tomorrow; probably then we'll be
+entirely different; how can it matter?"
+
+"It does, though, because you might hate me tomorrow for being myself
+tonight. What you think of me has to be big enough to guard against
+that. You hurt me, Lee, very much, talking in that way."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Alice Lucian, with George Willard, passed them and nodded significantly
+toward the entrance. "You will need a cloak," Lee told Anette;
+"it's blowing colder and colder." She vanished up the stairs, to
+the dressing-rooms, while Lee stood waiting with Willard. He didn't
+especially like the latter, a man with an exuberant loud friendliness, a
+good nature, that served as a cover for a facilely predatory sensuality.
+
+He was continually taking hold of feminine arms, bending close over
+dinner dresses; and he used--with a show of humorous frankness--his long
+knowledge of the girls of Eastlake as a reason for kissing them on every
+possible occasion.
+
+Anette and Alice appeared, with their wraps turned to exhibit the silk
+linings, bright like their dresses; and, at a favorable moment, they
+slipped out into the malice of the wind beating on them from the
+darkness. Anette was pressed tightly against Lee, Alice and George
+Willard were vaguely ahead; and, after a short breathless distance,
+they were in the protection of the shed. The Lucians' automobile had
+an elaborate enclosed body: shutting the doors they were completely
+comfortable, unobserved and warm. "No," Alice directed, "don't put on
+the light; I can find it. There! We'll have to use the cap for a glass."
+The aluminum top of the bottle was filled and refilled; the frigid
+gin and orange juice brought Lee Randon a glow of careless well-being,
+irresponsibility.
+
+The others had gone to the front seat, where they were squeezed into a
+remarkably small space. Anette sat leaning forward, her chin propped in
+her left hand and the right lightly resting on Lee's knee. A loose board
+in the shed kept up an exasperating clatter. A match flared and Willard
+lighted a cigarette. It was curious about Alice--only in the last year,
+and for no reason Lee could discover, had she done things such as
+this. Perhaps, with no children, and the money Warner had accumulated
+comparatively lately, she hadn't enough to do. Of course, Warner, a
+splendid individual, could not be called entertaining; he was totally
+absorbed in his business, often away at the wood-pulp mill, in the
+Laurentian Mountains, in which he had a large interest.
+
+Warner Lucian had nearly all the principal virtues--integrity,
+generosity, courage, and he was as single in mind as Willard was
+dubious; but, in spite of so much, it was clear that he had begun
+to weary Alice. She was publicly indifferent to him, careless of his
+wishes; she had even complained to Lee about her husband's good conduct,
+explaining that if he would only have what she termed an affair he would
+be more human.
+
+"I am still very cross at you." Anette spoke out of a gloom in which her
+face was barely distinguishable. "You took all the niceness out of our
+friendship and made it seem horrid; just as though you had pulled off my
+clothes; I--I haven't the same feeling about you."
+
+His effort at honesty, at discovering the mystery of profound disturbing
+needs, had been vain. Gathering Anette in his arms Lee kissed her.
+She rested there for a moment; then, with her hands against his chest,
+pushed him away. "I can't, now," she told him; "somehow it's all
+spoiled. It seemed as though you were studying me disapprovingly. I'm
+not just bad, you know."
+
+"I don't think you are bad at all," he replied irritably; "you brought
+that into it. Why, in the name of heaven, should I?"
+
+"Fanny doesn't like me," she said at a tangent.
+
+"Who put that in your head?"
+
+"Fanny. She's hardly civil."
+
+"If you mean she's jealous, she isn't."
+
+"You hardly need to add that. Of course, I realize Fanny Randon couldn't
+be jealous of me. Good Lord, no! Why should she be? No one would give me
+a thought."
+
+Anette, wholly irrational, was furious. Damn women, anyway! It was
+impossible to get along with them, since they hadn't a grain of reason.
+He was superior to her temper, indifferent to it, because he was
+indifferent to her. Suddenly the charm she had had for him was gone, the
+seductiveness dissolved, leaving only Anette, a fairly good-looking
+girl he had known for a great while. His warm response to her was dead;
+whatever she had aroused and satisfied, or left in suspense, no longer
+contented him. The memory of his interest in her, the thought he had
+expended, was now a cause of surprise, incomprehensible. Lee wanted to
+return to the club house and Fanny.
+
+There was an obscure indication of Alice's hands raised in the
+rearrangement of her hair. George Willard half turned, facing the rear
+of the car. "I can't see much," he said, "but it is evident that you
+two have been fighting. Why don't you live in peace and happiness? The
+trouble's all with Lee, too, you don't have to tell me that, Anette; he
+is too cursed cantankerous; and it would serve him right if you'd come
+up here with us."
+
+Anette opened the door and an icy draft swept about their knees. "Not
+yet," Willard begged; "we won't be missed."
+
+"You may stay as long as you want," Anette replied, "but I am going
+back." Positively her voice bore a trace of tears. What, what was it all
+about? It was Alice who decided that they should return together: "The
+bottle's empty, my hair net is fixed for the third time, and we had
+better. You get out, George, please. No, I told you."
+
+Lee Randon welcomed the solid rushing of the wind; it swept in full
+blast across the open of the golf course and made walking precarious.
+Anette was lost, forgotten. If the chill air could only take the fever,
+the desire, out of his mind and blood! He wished that he might be
+absorbed into the night, the storm, become one with its anonymous force,
+one with the trees he heard laboring on their trunks. Instead of the
+safety of being a part of nature he felt that, without directions, he
+had been arbitrarily set down on earth, left to wander blindly with no
+knowledge of his destination or its means of accomplishment.
+
+Fragments of a dance measure were audible, and he returned to the
+pounding music, the heat, the perceptibly chlorinated perfumes and
+determined activity. He went at once in search of his wife; she had
+apparently not moved from the chair in which he had left her. Meeting
+her slightly frowning, questioning expression he told her simply,
+without premeditation or reserve, that he had been out in an automobile.
+Fanny was obviously not prepared for his candor, and she studied him
+with the question held on her lifted face. Then banishing that she
+proceeded to scold him:
+
+"You know how I hate you to do such things, and it seems precisely as
+though my wish were nothing. It isn't because I am afraid of how you'll
+act, Lee; but I will not let you make a fool of yourself. And that,
+exactly, is what happens. I don't want women like Anette to have
+anything on you, or to think you'll come whenever they call you. I can't
+make out what it is in your character that's so--so weak. There simply
+isn't any other name for it. I don't doubt you, Lee," she repeated, in
+a different, fuller voice, "I know you love me; and I am just as certain
+you have never lied to me. I'm sure you haven't, in spite of what the
+girls say about men."
+
+He was cut by an unbearably sharp, a knife-like, regret that he had
+ever, with Fanny, departed from the utmost truth. Lee Randon had a
+sudden vision, born of that feeling returning from the shed, of the
+illimitable tranquility, the release from all triviality, of an honesty
+beyond equivocation or assault. Fanny, in her way, possessed it; but
+that, he saw, was made vulnerable, open to disaster, through her love
+for him. It was necessary, for complete safety, to be entirely insulated
+from the humanity of emotions. That condition he instinctively put from
+his thoughts as being as undesirable as it was beyond realization. Lee,
+with all his vitality, drew away from a conception, a figure, with the
+cold immobility of death. After all, he reassured himself, he had never
+essentially lied to Fanny; he had merely suppressed some unnecessary
+details in order to make their existence smoother. The welcome collapse
+of his small affair with Anette proved the wisdom of avoiding the
+exaggeration and difficulty of explanations.
+
+"Lee," Fanny said, changing the direction of their thoughts, "I don't
+want to bother you, but I am uneasy about Claire and Peyton. He hasn't
+left Mina Raff a minute this evening. And he has such an unhappy
+expression, not at all as though he were enjoying himself."
+
+"I noticed that," Lee agreed; "but it will do him no good with
+Mina--she's a cold potato, career's the only thing in her head." Then
+he remembered what Mina Raff had told him about her individuality, her
+personal desire; and he repeated it to his wife.
+
+"I don't think Claire is entirely wise," she went on; "but you can't
+tell her a thing. She listens as sweetly as possible and then says that
+she won't interfere with Peyton. Well, someone else will. Claire has too
+much reserve, she is too well-bred and quietly superior. You wait and
+see if I am not right; life is very vulgar, and it will take advantage
+of her."
+
+"I wonder if you are? Well, as you say, we shall see. If Mina Raff fixes
+her mind on him there will be a lot to watch."
+
+"You must speak to him."
+
+"Now there," Lee expostulated, "you make me sick. How--will you tell
+me--can I speak to Peyton until he first says something? And when that
+happens, as easily as not it may be a cable from Peru. You want to
+interfere too much, Fanny, and insist that everybody follow your idea of
+right."
+
+She retired into a silence of wisdom that merely looked down on him. Her
+face was troubled, her lips tightly compressed. "What time is it?" she
+asked sharply; "the ribbon of my watch is worn out. Oh, we can go home
+with decency. It makes me rather sick here."
+
+He went below, for his hat and coat, and found the room beyond the
+lockers, built as an informal café before the era of prohibition,
+occupied by a number of men transferring the balance of fulness from a
+row of bottles to themselves.
+
+He accepted a drink, more for the purpose of considering Peyton Morris,
+moodily abstracted by the table, than for itself. It seemed to Lee that
+the young man had actually aged since the cocktail party at his house,
+earlier in the evening. Peyton's mouth was hard and sullen; his brow was
+corrugated. "We're going home," Lee told him; "and it seemed to me that
+an hour ago Claire was tired."
+
+"She didn't tell me," Peyton responded punctiliously; "and certainly
+if she's low we'll go too." He rose promptly, and, with his outer garb,
+accompanied Lee Randon. His step was uncertain, and Lee put a hand under
+his elbow. "Liquored?" he asked casually.
+
+"Not in my brain," Peyton Morris returned: "it seems like I could never
+get drunk again; but my dam' feet are all over the place. Thanks
+for hanging on to me: I have an idea you are going to drop me pretty
+quickly."
+
+"I don't want to question you," Randon said, "or in any way force
+a confidence, but, Peyton, in addition to the relationship, I am
+exceptionally fond of Claire; and, since helping you is practically the
+same thing as helping her--"
+
+"I wish to Christ I had been sunk in the North Sea," Morris broke in
+bitterly.
+
+They were up the stairs and standing on the emptied floor of an
+intermission. Fanny, prepared to leave, was gazing about for him.
+"You've been an age," she cried to Lee; "and, Peyton, Claire is at last
+looking for you; although she'd kill me for saying it. You had better go
+outside a minute, first, and clear your head."
+
+He came very near to her, slightly swaying. "Fanny, you are a darling,
+but you are hard; you are hard as the Commandments."
+
+"That is not very kind, Peyton," she protested; "but I have some common
+sense."
+
+"Haven't you any uncommon sense?" he begged. "That's what I want. A
+little just now might save everything."
+
+"You must try to find out," she informed him; "I think I have been
+successful with Lee; anyhow he ought to say so."
+
+"I do," Lee Randon asserted quickly. "Fanny is wonderful. If I'm of no
+use go to her."
+
+"You don't know," Peyton muttered; "you can have no idea."
+
+"What in the world was he talking about?" she asked Lee in the
+automobile.
+
+"Peyton is in love with Mina Raff," he admitted shortly, in a pressure
+of conflicting emotions.
+
+"Lee!" she exclaimed; "are you sure? Did he say so? That is simply
+frightful."
+
+"I imagine it's worse than you realize."
+
+"Do you mean--"
+
+"Nothing actual yet," he interrupted her impatiently; "perhaps
+nothing you would bother about. But you'd be wrong. It's all in his
+thoughts--some damned spoiled ideal, and as dangerous as possible."
+
+"Poor Claire," she said.
+
+"Of course, that's the thing to say," he agreed. "The man is always a
+criminal in such situations."
+
+"You are not trying to defend him?" she asked quietly.
+
+"Maybe I am; I don't know. After all, we are jumping at conclusions;
+Peyton was drunk. But, for heaven's sake, if either of them comes to you
+don't just be moral. Try to understand what may have happened. If you
+lecture them they will leave you like a shot."
+
+Fanny was driving, and she moved one hand from the wheel to his cheek.
+"It isn't us, anyhow, Lee; and that is really all I care for. We are
+closer than others, different. I don't know what I'd do if you should
+die first--I couldn't move, I couldn't go on."
+
+"You would have the children," he reminded her.
+
+"They are nothing compared with you." It was the only time she had made
+such an admission, and it moved him profoundly. It at once surcharged
+him with gratitude and an obscure disturbance.
+
+"You mustn't pin so much to me," he protested; "you ought to think of a
+hundred other things."
+
+"I would if I could; I often try, but it is impossible. It is terrible
+to care for a man the way I do for you; and that's why I am so glad you
+are what you are: silly at times, ridiculously impressionable, but not
+at all like George Willard, or Peyton Morris."
+
+He had an overwhelming impulse to explain himself in the most searching
+unsparing detail to Fanny, the strange conviction that in doing it he
+would anticipate, perhaps escape, grave trouble. Lee Randon realized,
+however, that he would have to begin with the doll, Cytherea; and the
+difficulty, the preposterousness, of trying to make that clear to his
+wife, discouraged and kept him silent. No woman, and least of any the
+one to whom he was married, could be trusted to understand his feeling,
+his dissatisfaction in satisfaction, the restlessness at the heart of
+his peace.
+
+Fanny went up at once, but he lingered, with a cigar, in the living
+room. A clock struck one. A photograph of Claire with her bridesmaids,
+Peyton and his ushers, on a lawn, in the wide flowered hats of summer
+and identical boutonnières, stood on a table against the wall; and
+beyond was an early girlish picture of Fanny, in clothes already
+absurdly out of mode. She had a pure hovering smile; the aspect of
+innocence time had been powerless to change was accentuated; and her
+hands managed to convey an impression of appeal. He had been, in the
+phrase now current, crazy about her; he was still, he told himself
+strictly. Well, he was ... yet he had kissed Anette; not for the first
+time, either; but, he recognized, for the last. He was free of that!
+A space, a phase, of his life was definitely behind him. A pervading
+regret mingled with the relief of his escape from what he had finally
+seen as a petty sensuality. The little might, in the sequence, be safer,
+better, than the great. But he vigorously cast off that ignominious
+idea. A sense of curious pause, stillness, enveloped Lee and surprised
+him, startled him really, into sitting forward and attentive. The wind
+had dropped, vanished into the night and sky: the silence without was as
+utter as though Lee Randon were at the center of a vacuum.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+On Saturday morning Lee telephoned to his office, found nothing that
+required his immediate attention there and, the brief-case again in
+evidence, stayed at Eastlake. Fanny, too, with her hair severely plain
+and an air of practical accomplishment, was occupied with her day book.
+She kept this faithfully; but Lee couldn't decide whether the obvious
+labor or her pleasure in the accomplishment were uppermost. She
+addressed the day book with a frowning concentration, supplementary
+additions and subtractions on stray fragments of paper, which at times
+brought him with an offer of assistance to her shoulder. But this she
+resolutely declined--she must, she insisted, maintain her obligation
+along with his. However, Fanny, like all other women, he thought, was
+entirely ignorant of the principle of which money was no more than a
+symbol: she saw it not as an obligation, or implied power, but as an
+actuality, pouring from a central inexhaustible place of bright ringing
+gold and crisp currency.
+
+However, Fanny had always been accustomed to the ease of its possession,
+familiar with it; and that had stamped her with its superiority of
+finish. How necessary, he continued, money was to women; or, rather, to
+the women who engaged his imagination; and women were usually the first
+consideration, the jewelled rewards, of wealth. As he visualized, dwelt
+on, them, their magnetic grace of feeling and body was uppermost: sturdy
+utilitarian women in the kitchen, red-faced maids dusting his stairs,
+heavily breasted nurses, mothers, wives at their petty accounts--he
+ended abruptly a mental period escaping from the bounds of propriety.
+What he meant, all that he meant, was that beauty should be the main
+consideration. Lee applied himself to far different values; and, before
+he had finished, lunch was ready.
+
+"I have been thinking half the morning about Claire and Peyton," Fanny
+told him; "I do feel that we exaggerated the situation last night; it
+all seemed more immediate, bigger, than it will turn out. Heavens, as
+you said, they can't do anything, nothing can happen."
+
+He was still inclined to believe that. "There is a tremendous lot of
+talk and no result; yes--no one really does a thing. They want to, and
+that's all it comes to."
+
+Fanny cast a glance of repressed attention at him across a lower
+center-piece. "If you could be whatever you wanted, what and where, what
+would you choose?" she asked.
+
+"Here, with you and the children," his voice replied without hesitation.
+The youth of her expression was happily stained by a flush. He meant it,
+Lee told himself sharply. But about Peyton--
+
+"Of course, he was drunk last night, and he said nothing conclusive; he
+was only wretchedly unhappy--wished he had been killed in the war and
+all the romantic rest."
+
+"It is too much for me," Fanny decided generally; "but I am glad that
+I was young when I was; being alive was quite simple then. I am
+comparatively young, Lee, 'way under forty--well, two years--but you
+can't realize how things have changed in such a short while. The women
+we knew didn't even smoke then. Wasn't it only five or six years ago
+they were first allowed to in nice cafés? And, not simply that, men
+didn't, either, when they were with us. We used to go to Cape May; they
+called the dances hops; and do you, oh, do you, remember the bathing
+suits?"
+
+"I am not so certain about any great change," he objected. "I seem to
+recall--"
+
+"Horrid people will always be horrid!" she exclaimed. "I knew one or two
+very fast girls; but they were different about it from now, it was only
+whispered around and condemned, and it's shouted out today. I wish I had
+known you sooner; I would have done a lot better than your mother. I'd
+like to have had you, Lee, as a little boy; but I suppose you're enough
+that yet."
+
+His opposition to Fanny's maternal manner, directed at him, was stronger
+than customary; she seemed to accept in herself every responsibility for
+him; as though, whenever his actions were unfortunate, it had been
+due to her imperfect control. With practically no experience of life,
+guarded from its threatening aspects, her attitude was that, not without
+patience, she brought him with relative safety through a maze in which
+otherwise he'd be lost. This was evident now in what he felt to be the
+complacency of her voice and expression; and a perverse impulse grew in
+him to combat and shatter her blind satisfaction. Lee subdued this, in
+the merest decency; but the effort left him thoroughly irritated. He
+found, finally, an outlet for his annoyance in the restlessness of
+Helena; and he ordered her from the table.
+
+This show of paternal discipline Fanny met with lowered eyes and a
+silence that endured until Gregory had walked sedately from the room;
+then she reminded Lee that he must never, absolutely never, correct his
+children when he was in an ill temper.
+
+"That's nonsense," he returned shortly; "you ought to see that because
+it's impossible. Even theoretically I don't agree with you--a child can
+understand a punishment in which there is some warmth. You are dealing
+with a little animal and not a reasonable being." To this Fanny replied
+that her children were not animals.
+
+"Really, Fanny, you don't know what you are talking about," he asserted;
+"we are all, men and women and children and giraffes, animals. You might
+look that up in the dictionary."
+
+"I haven't any need to," she observed, with a calmness that further
+tried him. "If the dictionary says that it isn't a very good one. And
+if you are trying to tell me that Helena and Gregory are no better than
+giraffes you're sillier than usual."
+
+"That isn't in the least what I said," Lee retorted, with widely
+separated words. "I wasn't speaking of the comparative but of the
+absolute. It is a fact that we are animals, more responsible and with
+greater powers than the others, but animals, animals."
+
+"Then what is an animal?" Fanny demanded.
+
+"A mammal."
+
+A marked expression of distaste invaded her. "It has a nasty sound," she
+admitted with her instinctive recoiling from life. "I don't see how we
+got on this subject anyhow, it's too much like sex. It seems you are
+able to discuss nothing else."
+
+"It is only nasty in your mind," he declared.
+
+"That's exactly like you, you all over, to blame things on me. It's
+convenient, I must say, but not fair nor true: it was you who got in a
+wicked temper and sent Helena, who was feeling miserable, away."
+
+"You always say the children are sick when they misbehave."
+
+"I wish I could be as sure of you as I was of that," she answered
+quickly; "for instance, when you go out in automobiles at the dances
+with women."
+
+"Now, we are beginning," he told her with emphasis; "we never had an
+argument that didn't degenerate into this; and I'm sick of it."
+
+"I thought I was the one who was sick of it," Fanny complained; "I
+wonder that I don't just let you go."
+
+"I wish you would," he said, rising; "I give you my word, I'd rather
+be damned comfortably than have this endless trouble." In a position of
+unassailable quiet behind his papers he told himself that the scene with
+Fanny had been particularly vain because, underneath, he agreed with
+her opinion about the casual expression of small emotions; he no longer
+wanted it any more than she did. Yes, at last they were one there. And
+yet he felt further from her even than before--whatever his marriage
+hadn't satisfied, that he had stilled in minor ways, was now without
+check. The truth was that it had increased, become more serious,
+insistent.
+
+The tangible facts, the letters and memoranda, before him, retreated and
+came back to his consciousness. Tobacco worms had been boring through
+his cigars, and destroyed a third of the box. Helena passed, affecting
+a grievance out of any proportion to its cause in him. Outside, the
+country was flooded with a deceptive golden radiance; and he remembered,
+suddenly, that Alice Lucian had told him to bring Fanny to the Club and
+a tea that afternoon, which she was giving for Mina Raff. He repeated
+this to his wife, in a conciliatory regret at his forgetfulness; and she
+replied that if he cared to go she would come over later for him in the
+car. Lee, standing at a window, thought he wouldn't; but, adding
+that Peyton would be there, he decided that, in view of the possible
+developments, his presence might be wise.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The early gloom gathered familiarly in the long main room of the
+clubhouse; the fire cast out fanwise and undependable flickering
+light upon the relaxed figures; it shone on tea cups, sparkled in rich
+translucent preserves, and glimmered through a glass sugar bowl. It was
+all, practically, Lee Randon reflected, as it had been before and would
+be again. How few things, out of a worldful, the ordinary individual
+saw, saw--that was--to comprehend, to experience: a limited number of
+interiors, certain roads and streets, fields and views. He made his way
+through life blinded to the customary and unaware of the strange; summer
+was hot and winter, usually, cold; the spring became green under
+rain; winds blew and the leaves fell in fall--of how much more was he
+conscious?
+
+It was the same with regard to people; he, Lee Randon, knew a
+great many, or rather, he could repeat their names, recognize their
+superficial features at sight. But to say that he actually knew
+them--that was nonsense! Why, he was almost totally ignorant of himself.
+How much could he explain of Fanny's late state of mind? She had done
+all that was possible to make it clear to him; with little result. Fanny
+was an extraordinarily honest person; or, damn it, she seemed to be. He
+had a reputation for truthfulness; but how much of what was in his mind
+would he admit to his wife? The discrepancy between what he appeared
+and what he felt himself to be, what he thought and what published, was
+enormous, astounding.
+
+There, as well, was Peyton Morris; Lee would have sworn that he
+understood him thoroughly--a character as simple, as obvious as Fanny's.
+But here was Morris seated with Mina Raff on the stairs to the upper
+floor, beyond the radius of the fire; and, though they were not ten feet
+away, he could not hear a word of what they were saying. At intervals
+there was an indistinct murmur, nothing more. Claire, at Lee Randon's
+side, was sitting with her chin high and a gaze concentrated on the
+twisting flames: talking generally had fallen into a pause.
+
+The door from without opened, Fanny entered, and there was a momentary
+revival of animation. "Is Lee here?" she demanded; "but I know he is.
+The fire is just as attractive at home, yet, even with nothing to do,
+he'll hardly wait to give it a poke. Where's Peyton?"
+
+"On the stairs," someone answered casually.
+
+There was a movement, and Mina Raff approached. "It's so hot here," she
+asserted.
+
+"It is warmer out," Fanny informed her; "I wonder what the weather is in
+New York?"
+
+"I can't say, I'm sure; but I shall discover tomorrow morning. I have to
+be back as early as possible. Then--work, work, work."
+
+"Mina has been made a star," Peyton Morris announced. But he stopped
+awkwardly, apparently conscious of the warmth, the largeness, in his
+voice. Fanny whispered to Lee that it was quite too outrageous. In
+return, he asked, "What?" and, indignant, she drew away from him.
+
+The conversation died again. Lee Randon could see Mina Raff's profile,
+held darkly against the glow; her lips and chin were firm. "Where,"
+Anette asked her, "shall you stay when you get back--at Savina Grove's?"
+No, Mina replied, her hours would be too long and uncertain to allow
+that; probably she would be at the Plaza. Lee had heard the Groves' name
+mentioned before in connection with Mina Raff; and he made an effort
+to recall the reason. The Groves--it was the William Loyd Groves--were
+rather important people, financially and socially; and one of them, yes,
+that was it, was related to Mina, but which he didn't know.
+
+More came back to him: Mina Raff's parents had died when she was a young
+girl, and the Groves had rescued her from the undistinguished evils of
+improvidence; she had lived with them until, against their intensest
+objections, she had gone into moving pictures. Probably the Groves'
+opposition had lasted until Mina's success; or, in other words, their
+support had been withheld from her through the period when it had been
+most needed.
+
+Yes, the girl had a determined mouth. If he, Lee Randon, had followed
+his first inclinations--were they in the way of literature?--how
+different his life would have been. Mina Raff had been stronger, more
+selfish, than her environment: selfishness and success were synonymous.
+Yet, as a human quality, it was more hated, more reviled, than any
+other. Its opposite was held as the perfect, the heavenly, ethics of
+conduct. To be sacrificed, that was the accepted essence of Christ;
+fineness came through relinquishment. He didn't believe it, he told
+himself fiercely; something deep, integral, in him revolted absolutely.
+
+Mina Raff had been wholly justified; the very people who had thrown
+all their weight against her admitted it fully. It was only when such a
+self-belief was without compensating result, value, that it was wrong.
+But who could say what any outcome would be? Some people took the chance
+and others didn't; he had not. Then the question came up of whether he
+had not failed as it was? No one would agree with him that it might be
+failure; he hadn't called it that. Suddenly, vehemently, he wished
+that he could grow old at once, in a second; anything to quiet the
+restlessness at his heart.
+
+Lee had a conviction that he ought to decide the case of the individual
+against the world, the feeling that it was of the greatest importance
+to him; but for centuries men had considered, without answer, just that.
+The thing to do was to live, not to think; for it was possible that
+those who thought, weighed causes and results, hardly lived at all in
+the sense he meant. All the people he knew were cautious before they
+were anything else; they existed primarily for their stomachs. The
+widely advertised beauty of self sacrifice was golden only when it
+adorned like a halo the heads of others. That was natural, inevitable
+to the struggle for survival; it didn't answer Lee's question, which, he
+felt, was of the spirit rather than the body.
+
+"It's getting late," Fanny said briskly. There was a general movement,
+sighs and the settling of skirts. The lights were switched on, and the
+fire, that had been a source of magic, became nothing more than ugly
+grey charring logs with a few thin tongues of flame. Lee, with his
+wife, stopped to say good-bye to Mina Raff; Fanny's manner was bright,
+conventional; as palpably insincere to the other woman, Lee was certain,
+as it was to him. He said:
+
+"I hope your new picture will go well."
+
+"Thank you," she responded, her slight hand lingeringly holding his;
+"perhaps you will like me better on the screen than in reality."
+
+"Could you tell me which was which?"
+
+She hesitated. "Three months ago, yes, but not now; I'm not sure of
+myself."
+
+"That was positively indecent," Fanny observed afterward; "she is as
+bold as brass. I hope I am not as big a fool as Claire."
+
+"Claire and you are very different," he told her; "I have an idea that
+she is doing whatever is possible. But then we don't know what we
+are talking about: it's fairly evident that Peyton and Mina Raff are
+interested in each other, they may be in love; and, if they are, what
+does that mean? It isn't your feeling for the children or mine for you;
+they are both love; yet what is it?"
+
+"It is God in us," Fanny said gravely; "and keeps us all, Helena and
+Gregory and you and me, safely together."
+
+She seldom spoke to him of religion, but it dwelt closely, vitally,
+within her, and not as an inherited abstraction or correct social
+observation, but definitely personal in its intercommunication. Lee
+Randon had none at all; and in her rare references to it he could only
+preserve an awkward silence. That had always been a bar between his
+family and himself, particularly with the children: he was obliged
+to maintain an endless hypocrisy about the miracles, the dogmas and
+affairs, of Sunday school and the church. As a child he had been so
+filled with a literal Presbyterian imagery that, when a degree of reason
+discarded figures of speech seen as concrete actualities, nothing had
+been left. With the lapse of a purely pictorial heaven and hell, the
+loss of eternal white choirs and caldrons of the unrepentant, only earth
+remained.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+He could recall in gloomy detail his early impression of Paradise: it
+was a sombre plain floating cloud-like in air, with, doubling through
+it, an unspeakable sluggish river of blood; God, bearded and frowning in
+the severity of chronic judgment, dominated from an architectural throne
+a throng of the saved in straight garments and sandalled feet; and, in
+the foreground, a lamb with a halo and an uplifted cross was intent on
+the baptism of individuals issuing unaccountably white from the thickly
+crimson flood.
+
+Yet his children, in a modified Episcopalian form, were being taught the
+same thing: the Mosaic God; Christ Jesus who took unto Himself the sin
+of the world; the rugged disciple, St. Peter and the loving disciple,
+St. John. The sky, they learned, was the habitation of light-winged
+angels. The ark was still reported on its memorable voyage, with its
+providential pairs of animals gathered from every zone, but there was
+a growing reticence about Jonah. The persistence of such credulity, Lee
+thought, was depressing; just as the churches, leaning on the broken
+support of a charity they were held to dispense, were a commentary on
+the poverty of the minds and spirits of men.
+
+Yes, the necessity of charging Helena and Gregory with such assurances,
+their rigid bending into mental forms, large and small, in which he
+had no confidence, put Lee outside the solidity of his family. In the
+instruction, the influences, widely held paramount in the welding of
+polite Christian characters, Fanny was indefatigable--the piece of
+silver firmly clasped in the hand for collection, the courtesy
+when addressed by elders, the convention that nature, birds, were
+sentimentally beneficent. When Gregory brought out these convictions,
+lessons, in his indescribably fresh eager tones, Lee listened with a
+helpless disapproval.
+
+Everything, it seemed to Lee Randon, increased the position of
+self-delusion at the expense of what he felt to be reality. His doubts,
+for example, were real; with no will, no effort on his part, they
+invaded his mind ceaselessly. Cytherea's disturbing charm was real, as
+definite as Fanny's quiet actuality. However, he wasn't interested in
+an abstract arraignment of life, but intent only on the truth about
+himself. Lee wanted to discharge fully his duty to existence--in the
+more inglorious phrase, he didn't want to make a fool of himself--and
+yet it was growing more difficult all the while to distinguish folly
+from sense.
+
+This affair, if it did exist, of Peyton's with Mina Raff wasn't so
+easily determined as Fanny insisted. Perhaps, like his own, Peyton
+Morris' life had been restricted by artificial barriers thrown about the
+rebellious integrity of his fundamental being. Few children could
+stand out against the combined forces of the older world; but it was
+conceivable that, later, like a chrysalis, they might burst the hard,
+superimposed skin and emerge triumphant.
+
+That damned problem of self-sacrifice!
+
+How much claim had men upon each other? What did children gain who
+sacrificed their lives for their parents? It was supposed to bring them
+nobility; but, at the same time, didn't it develop in the parents the
+utmost callous selfishness; didn't the latter, as their needs were
+exclusively consulted, grow more exacting, unreasonable? Was not love
+itself the most unreasonable and exacting thing imaginable?
+
+Once surrendered to it, the tyranny of a beloved subject was absolute:
+Lee told himself that the emotion he was considering--the most sacred
+of earthly ties--ignominiously resembled the properties of fly paper. He
+turned abruptly from that graceless thought: it was a great deal warmer,
+and a mist, curiously tangible in the night, was rising through the bare
+branches of the maple trees.
+
+"I am going to talk to Claire," Fanny said firmly.
+
+"It would do both of you no good," he informed her; "besides, you'll
+have to take so much for granted."
+
+"Claire will tell me."
+
+"I wonder?" They were in their room, preparing for bed; Fanny, with
+her hair spread in a thin brown tide over the chaste shoulders of her
+nightgown, was incredibly like a girl. The mechanical sweep of her hand
+with a brush kept a brief sleeve falling back from the thinness of her
+arm. How delicately methodical she was--an indispensable quality in
+the repeated trying contacts, the lost privacy, of marriage. So much
+depended upon the very elusiveness which the security of possession,
+habit, destroyed.
+
+"This love," he continued his speculations aloud, "isn't at all
+understood--we are ignorant about it in spite of endless experience and
+reports and poetry. Take us," he had one of his dangerous impulses of
+complete honesty, "before we were married, while we were engaged, we
+had an impracticable romantic attraction for each other. I know that
+I thought of you all the time, day and night; and, just because you
+existed, the whole world was full of prismatic colors; it was as though
+an orchestra were playing continually and I were floating on the finest
+music. You were like a figure in heaven that drew me up to you.
+
+"Well, that lasted quite a while into our marriage; at first I had
+an even greater emotion. Then, as Helena and Gregory were born, it
+changed." Midway in the brushing of her hair Fanny was motionless
+and intent. "I don't say it decreased, Fanny, that it lost any of its
+importance; but it did change; and in you as well as me. It wasn't
+as prismatic, as musical, and there's no use contradicting me. I can
+explain it best for myself by saying that my feeling for you became
+largely tenderness."
+
+"Oh!" Fanny exclaimed, in a little lifting gasp; "oh, and that
+tenderness," her cheeks were bright with sudden color, "why, it is no
+more than pity."
+
+"That isn't just," he replied; "unless you want to speak of pity at its
+very best. No, that won't do: my affection for you is made of all our
+experiences, our lives and emotions, together. We are tied by a thousand
+strings--common disappointments and joy and sickness and hope and pain
+and heaven knows what else. We're held by habit, too, and convenience
+and the opinion of society. Certainly it is no smaller than the first,"
+he argued, but more to himself than to Fanny; "that was nothing but a
+state of mind, of spirit; you can't live on music."
+
+"Don't you think you have said enough for one night?" she asked, in
+a calm voice belied by the angry sparkle of her eyes, the faint
+irrepressible trembling of her lips. "Do you think I want to hear that
+it is only convention and our neighbors that keep you with me? You have
+no right to insist that your horridness is true of me, either. I--I
+could hear music, if you would let me." She sank on the little cushioned
+bench before her dressing table, where her youthfulness took on a
+piercing aspect of misery. Fanny's declaration, not far from tears,
+that she was just as she had always been was admirably upheld by her
+appealing presence.
+
+The tenderness he had admitted, reduced by a perceptive impatience and
+the sense of having been wholly, wilfully, misunderstood, carried him
+over to her. He took Fanny, with her face strained away from him, into
+his arms. "Don't be an idiot," he begged softly; "you ought to be used
+to my talking by now. Let me go on, it can't come to anything--" She
+stiffened in his embrace:
+
+"What do you mean by that?"
+
+"Nothing, nothing," he answered shortly, releasing her; "where is all
+that certainty you assured me of? If you go on like this I shall never
+be able to tell you my thoughts, discuss problems with you; and it seems
+to me that's very necessary."
+
+"It has been lately," she spoke in a metallic voice; "nothing satisfies
+you any more; and I suppose I should have been prepared to have you say
+things to me, too. But I'm not; you might even find that I am not the
+idiot you suspect."
+
+"I was giving you a chance to prove that," he pointed out.
+
+"Now you have discovered the fatal truth you can save yourself more
+trouble in the future." She emphatically switched off a light beside
+her, leaving him standing in a sole unsparing illumination. Yet in her
+extreme resentment she was, he recognized, rubbing Vaseline into her
+finger nails, her final nightly rite. Then there was silence where
+once he had kissed her with a reluctance to lose her in even the short
+oblivion of sleep.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Throughout Monday, at his office, Lee Randon thought at uncomfortable
+intervals of the late incipient scenes with Fanny. They had
+quarrels--who hadn't?--but they had usually ended in Fanny shedding some
+tears that warmly recemented their deep affections. This latter time,
+however, she had not wept--at the point of dissolving into the
+old surrender she had turned away from him, both in reality and
+metaphorically, and fallen asleep in an unexpected cold reserve. He was
+sorry, for it brought into their relationship a definite new quality of
+difference. He was aware of the thorough inconsistency of his attitude
+toward their marriage; again two opposed forces were present in
+him--one, Fanny, as, bound to her, he knew and cherished; and the
+other--the devil take the other!
+
+He was organizing a new company, and, figuring impatiently, he pressed
+the button for Mrs. Wald, his secretary. She appeared at once and
+quietly, her notebook and pencil ready, took a place at his side. "Run
+this out, please, Mrs. Wald," and an involved financial transaction
+followed. What he wanted to ascertain was, with a preferred stock
+bearing eight per cent at a stated capitalization, and the gift of a
+bonus of common, share for share, how much pie would remain to be cut up
+between a Mr. Hadly, Sanford, and himself? The woman worked rapidly,
+in long columns of minute neat figures. "About thirty-four thousand
+dollars, each, Mr. Randon," she announced almost directly. "Is that
+close enough; or do you want it to the fraction?"
+
+"Good enough; send Miss Mathews in."
+
+Almost anyone on his staff, Lee reflected, knew more about the processes
+of his business than he did; he supplied the energy, the responsibility
+of the decisions, more than the brains of his organization; and
+it perfected the details. The stenographer, Miss Mathews, was very
+elaborately blonde, very personable; and, dictating to her, Lee Randon
+remembered the advice given him by a large wielder of labor and finance.
+"Lee," he had said, touching him with the emphasis of a finger, "never
+play around with an employee or a client."
+
+He, John Lenning Partins, had been a man of eccentric humors, and--like
+all individuals who supported heavy mental burdens, inordinately taxed
+their brains--he had his hours, unknown to the investing public, of
+erratic, but the word was erotic, conduct. On more than one occasion
+he had peremptorily telegraphed for Lee to join him at some unexpected
+place, for a party. Once, following a ball at the Grand Opera House, in
+Paris, they had motored in a taxi-cab, with charming company, to Calais.
+During that short stay in France John Partins had spent, flung variously
+away, four hundred thousand dollars.
+
+The industrious, the clerks, efficient women like Mrs. Wald, the
+middle-aged lawyers in his office, were rewarded...by a pension. It
+was all very strange, upside down: what rot that was about the infinite
+capacity for taking pains! He supposed it wouldn't do to make this
+public, the tritest maxims were safer for the majority; but it was too
+bad; it spread the eternal hypocrisies of living. He asked Miss Mathews:
+
+"You're not thinking of getting married, are you? Because if you do I'll
+have your young man deported; I simply won't let go of you."
+
+"I don't see any signs of it, Mr. Randon," she replied, half serious and
+half smiling; "my mother thinks it's awful, but I'm not in any hurry.
+There are men I know, who might like me; they show me a very good time;
+but somehow I am not anxious. I guess in a way it's the other married
+girls I see: either they housework at home, and I couldn't be bothered
+with that; or they are in an office and, somehow, that seems wrong,
+too. I want so much," she admitted; "and with what clothes cost now it's
+terrible."
+
+"Moralists and social investigators would call you a bad girl," he told
+her; "but I agree with you; get your pretty hats and suits, and smart
+shoes, as long as you are able. You're not a bit better in a kitchen
+than you are here, taking dictation from me; and I am not sure you would
+be more valuable at home with a child or two. You are a very unusual
+stenographer, rapid and accurate, and you have a good mind in addition
+to your figure. Why should you lose all that at once, give it up, for
+the accidents of cholera infantum and a man, as likely as not, with a
+consumptive lung?"
+
+"But what about love, Mr. Randon? That's what throws me off. Some say
+it's the only thing in life."
+
+"I'm damned if I know," he admitted, leaning back from his wide
+flat-topped desk. "I hear the same thing, and I am rather inclined to
+believe it. But I have an idea that it is very different from what most
+people insist; I don't think it is very useful around the house; it has
+more to do with the pretty hat than with a dishpan. If you fall in
+love go after the thing itself, then; don't hesitate about tomorrow
+or yesterday; and, above all else, don't ask yourself if it will last;
+that's immaterial."
+
+"You make it sound wild enough," she commented, rising.
+
+"The wilder the better," he insisted; "if it is not delirious it's
+nothing."
+
+The road and countryside over which he returned in the motor sedan,
+partly frozen, were streaked by rills of muddy surface water; the sky,
+which appeared definitely to rest on the surrounding hills, was grey
+with a faint suffusion of yellow at the western horizon. It was all as
+dreary, as sodden, as possible. Eastlake, appearing beyond a shoulder of
+bare woods, showed a monotonous scattering of wet black roofs, raw
+brick chimneys, at the end of a long paved highway glistening with steel
+tracks.
+
+Lee Randon was weary, depressed: nothing in his life, in any existence,
+offered the least recompense for the misfortune of having been born. He
+left his car at the entrance of his dwelling; Christopher, the gardener,
+came sloshing over the sod to take it into the garage; and, within, he
+found the dinner-table set for three. "It's Claire," his wife informed
+him; "she called up not half an hour ago to ask if she could come.
+Peyton was away over night, she said, and she wanted to see us." He went
+on up to his room, inattentive even to Claire's possible troubles.
+
+He dressed slowly, automatically, and descended to the fire-lit space
+that held Cytherea in her mocking, her becoming, aloofness. In the
+brightly illuminated room beyond the hall Helena and Gregory were
+playing parchesi--Gregory firmly grasped the cup from which he intently
+rolled the dice; Helena shook the fair hair from her eyes and, it
+immediately developed, moved a pink marker farther than proper.
+
+"You only got seven!" Gregory exclaimed; "and you took it nine right on
+that safety."
+
+"What if I did?" she returned undisturbed. "I guess a girl can make a
+mistake without having somebody yell at her. Your manners aren't very
+good."
+
+"Yes, they are, too," he asserted, aggrieved; "I have to tell you if
+you move to a safety where you don't belong." He shook the dice from the
+cup. "Now, see there--that just brings me to your man, and I can send
+him home."
+
+"I don't care," Helena informed him; "it's a young sort of game, anyhow.
+Now I'm wearing waists and buttoned skirts I'd just as leaves write a
+letter to Margaret West with no boys in it at all."
+
+She left the parchesi board, and crossed the room to the piano, where
+she stood turning over sheets of music with a successful appearance of
+critical interest. Gregory, silently struggling with the injustice of
+this, gazed up with a shadowed brow at Lee. "I was going to beat her,"
+he said, "I was almost home, and she went away. She just got up like
+nothing was happening." Helena put in, "Neither there was." Lee Randon
+took her place. "You can beat me instead," he proposed. His interest
+in the game, he felt, was as false as Helena's pretended musical
+preoccupation; but he rolled the dice and shifted the counters, under
+Gregory's undeviating scrutiny, with the conviction that parchesi was
+not conspicuously different from the other more resounding movements of
+the world and its affairs. Gregory easily vanquished him, and Lee rose
+with a curt, unwarranted nod of dismissal.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Freezing cocktails in the pewter pitcher, in the repetition of minor
+duties which, Lee Randon thought, now constituted four-fifths of his
+life, he told himself that Claire Morris had never looked better: she
+was wearing a dress of a soft negative blue material, high about her
+throat, with glimpses of bright embroidery that brought out her darkly
+vivid personality. Claire had a slim low-breasted figure, gracefully
+broad shoulders; and her face, it might be because of its definite,
+almost sharp, outline, held the stamp of decided opinions. Claire's
+appearance, he recognized, her bearing, gave an impression of arrogance
+which, however, was only superficially true--she could be very
+disagreeable in situations, with people, that she found inferior,
+brutally casual and unsympathetic; but more privately, intimately, she
+was remarkably simple-hearted, free from reserve. She was related to Lee
+through her father, a good blood, he told himself; but her mother had
+brought her a concentration of what particular vigorous aristocracy--an
+unlimited habit of luxury without the responsibility of acknowledged
+place--the land afforded.
+
+The drinks had been consumed, the soup disposed of, when Claire said
+abruptly, "Peyton is going to leave me."
+
+Although, in a way, Lee had been prepared for such an announcement, the
+actuality upset him extremely. Fanny gasped, and then nodded warningly
+toward the waitress, leaving the dining-room; at any conceivable
+disaster, he reflected, Fanny would consider the proprieties.
+
+"When did he tell you?" Fanny demanded.
+
+"He didn't," Claire replied; "I told him. It was a great relief to both
+of us."
+
+"Say what you like outside," Lee put in vigorously; "but at least with
+us be honest."
+
+"I am, quite," she assured him; "naturally I don't want Peyton to go--I
+happen to love him. And there's Ira. But it was an impossible position;
+it couldn't go on, Peyton was absolutely wretched, we both were; and
+so I ended it. I laid out all his best silk pajamas so that he'd look
+smart--"
+
+"How can you?" Fanny cried; "oh, how can you? It is too wicked, all too
+horrible, for words. I don't think you are advanced or superior, Claire,
+you failed him and yourself both. It's perfectly amazing to me, after
+the men you have met, that you don't know them. You must keep them going
+in the right direction; you can't let them stop, or look around, once;
+I only learned that lately, but it is so. They haven't an idea of what
+they want, and they try everything. Then if you let a man go he is the
+first to blame you; it's like winking at murder."
+
+"How could I keep him when he didn't want to stay?" Claire asked
+wearily; "I am not too moral, but I couldn't quite manage that. Then
+what you say might do for some men, but not Peyton. You see, he has
+always been very pure; all his friends at Princeton were like that; they
+were proud of it and very severe on the other. And afterwards, when he
+went into the city, it was the same; Peyton would get drunk any number
+of times with any number of men, but, as he said, he was off women. The
+stage door, it seems, is very old-fashioned now.
+
+"When we were engaged, and he told me that he was really pure, I was
+simply mad with happiness. I thought it was such a marvelous thing for
+a girl to find. I still think that; and yet, I don't know. If he were
+different, had had more experience, perhaps this wouldn't have hit him
+so hard. He would have kissed his Mina on the porch, outside the dance,
+and come home."
+
+"As for that Raff woman--" Fanny stopped, at a loss for a term to
+express her disgust.
+
+"Why not?" Claire asked. "She wanted Peyton and went after him: he isn't
+for her art, I believe, but for herself. I haven't talked to her; I
+can't make up my mind about that. Probably it would do no good. Peyton
+is splendidly healthy; it won't be necessary to tell her anything about
+draughts and stomach bands."
+
+"Claire, you're utterly, tragically wrong," Fanny wailed. "I wish I
+could shake sense into you. Up to a point this is your fault; you are
+behaving in a criminally foolish way."
+
+"What do you think Claire should do?" Lee asked his wife.
+
+She turned to him, a flood of speech on her lips; but, suddenly, she
+suppressed it; the expression, the lines, of concern were banished
+from her face. "There is so much," she replied equably; "they haven't
+discussed it enough; why, it ought to take a year, two, before they
+reached such a decision. Peyton can't know his mind, nor Claire hers.
+And Ira, that darling innocent little child."
+
+"Damn Ira!" Claire Morris exclaimed.
+
+"You mustn't," Fanny asserted; "you're not yourself. Mina Raff should
+be burned alive, something terrible done to her." Fanny's voice had the
+hard cold edge of fanatical conviction. "If she had come into my house
+making trouble.... But that couldn't have happened; I'd have known at
+once."
+
+"You are more feminine than I am," Claire told her. "I see this in a
+very detached manner, as if it didn't concern me. I suppose I can't
+realize that it has happened to us. It has! But if you are right, Fanny,
+and it's necessary to treat a man like a green hunter, then this was
+bound to occur. I couldn't do anything so--so humiliating; he could bolt
+sooner or later. I did the best I knew how: I was amusing as possible
+and always looked well enough. I never bothered Peyton about himself and
+encouraged him to keep as much of his freedom as possible.
+
+"I don't believe in the other," she said to Fanny Randon in a sharp
+accession of rebellion; "it is degrading, and I won't live that way, I
+won't put up with it. If he wants to go, to be with Mina Raff, how in
+God's name can I stop it? I won't have him in my bed with another woman
+in his heart; I made that clear to you. And I can't have him hot and
+cold--now all Mina and then the sanctity of his home. I've never had a
+house of that kind; it was christened, like a ship, with champagne.
+
+"I have never cared for domestic things. I'd rather wear a dinner-gown
+than an apron; I'd a damn sight rather spin a roulette wheel than rock a
+cradle. And, perhaps, Peyton wanted a housewife; though heaven knows he
+hasn't turned to one. It's her blonde, no bland, charm and destructive
+air of innocence. I've admitted and understood too much; but I couldn't
+help it--my mother and grandmother, all that lot, were the same way,
+and went after things themselves. The men hated sham and sentimentality;
+they asked, and gave, nothing."
+
+Fanny, it was evident, was growing impatient at what was not without its
+challenge of her character and expressed convictions. "I do agree with
+you, Claire, that we are not alike," she admitted. Her voice bore a
+perceptible note of complacency, of superior strength and position.
+"Just last week I was telling Lee that I belonged before the war--things
+were so different then, and, apparently, it's only in my house they
+haven't changed. We are frightfully behind the times, and you'd be
+surprised at how glad we are. It was your mother's father, wasn't it,
+who fell in love with the Spanish woman while he was in the Embassy
+at Seville? My family weren't people of public connections, although
+a great-aunt married Senator Carlinton; but they had the highest
+principles."
+
+"They were lucky," Claire Morris replied indifferently; "I am beginning
+to think it isn't what you have so much as what happens to it. Anyhow,
+Peyton is going away with Mina Raff, and I am sorry for him; he's so
+young and so certain; but this has shaken him. Peyton's a snob, really,
+like the rest of his friends, and Mina's crowd won't have that for a
+moment: he can't go through her world judging men by their slang and
+by whom they knew at college. I envy him, it will be a tremendously
+interesting experience." If her eyes were particularly brilliant it was
+because they were surrounded by an extreme darkness. Her voice, commonly
+no more than a little rough in its deliberate forthrightness, was high
+and metallic. She gave Lee the heroic impression that no most mighty
+tempest would ever see her robbed of her erect defiance. It was at once
+her weakness and strength that she could be broken but not bent.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+After dinner Claire, who was staying with the Randons until tomorrow,
+played picquet with Lee; and his wife, her shapely feet elevated above
+the possible airs of the floor, continued to draw threads from the
+handkerchiefs she was making for Christmas. Claire played very well and,
+at five cents a point, he had to watch the game. On a specially big
+hand she piqued and repiqued. "That," she declared, "will pay you for
+caputting me." The jargon of their preoccupation, "A point of six; yes,
+to the ace; paid; and a quatorze, kings," was the only sound until Fanny
+rose, decidedly. "I am going to bed." She hesitated at the door. "I hope
+you'll be comfortable, Claire: I had some club soda and rye put in your
+room, since you like it so well. Don't be too late, please, Lee; it
+makes you tired starting so early in the morning."
+
+"You'll have to forgive me," Claire said, when Fanny had gone; "but I
+don't--I never did--like women."
+
+"Do you think any more of men, now?"
+
+"Heavens, yes. I wish I could find someone to blame for what has
+happened, Peyton specially, but I can't, not to save my life. It seems
+so hopelessly inevitable. I don't want you to suppose I'm not unhappy,
+Lee; or that I care only a little for Peyton. I love him very much; I
+needed him, and my love, more than I can explain. As Fanny as good as
+told me, I am a wild bird; anything, almost, with what is behind me, may
+happen. It was just the irony of chance that this affair caught Peyton,
+the immaculate, instead of me. I was awfully glad that I had an anchor
+that seemed so strong; in my own faulty way I adored everything I had; I
+wanted to be tranquil, and it had a look of security."
+
+"It isn't over, Claire," Lee asserted. "I haven't seen that young fool
+yet."
+
+"Please don't bother him; and it's too much to drag out the moralities
+on my account."
+
+"Moralities!" he echoed indignantly, "who said a word about them? I'm
+not interested in morals. Lord, Claire, how little you know me. And
+as for bothering him, he'll have to put up with that. He has invited a
+certain amount of it."
+
+They forgot the game and faced each other across the disordered cards.
+"If I won't argue with him," she insisted, "you can't. But we needn't
+discuss it--he won't listen to you, Peyton's all gone. I never saw such
+a complete wreck."
+
+"He can't avoid it," Lee went on; "I'll have to do it if it is only for
+myself; I am most infernally curious about the whole works. I want to
+find out what it's about."
+
+"If you mean love, he can't tell you; he hasn't had enough experience to
+express it. You might do better with me."
+
+"No, I want it from the man; a woman's feeling, even yours, would do
+me no good. You see, this has always been explored, accounted for,
+condemned, written about, from the feminine side. Where the man is
+considered it is always in the most damnable light. If, in the novels, a
+man leaves his home he is a rascal of the darkest sort, and his end is a
+remorse no one would care to invite. That may be, but I am not prepared
+to say. No, dear Claire, I am not considering it in preparation for
+anything; I want to know; that's all."
+
+"The books are stuff, of course," she agreed. "The grandfather of mine
+who was killed in Madrid--it wasn't Seville--must have had a gorgeous
+time: a love affair with one of the most beautiful women alive. It
+lasted five months before it was found out and ended; and his wife and
+he had been sick of living together. After it was over she was pleased
+at being connected with such a celebrated scandal; it made her better
+looking by reflected loveliness. She was rather second class, I believe,
+and particularly fancied the duchess part."
+
+"It wouldn't be like that in the current novels, or even in the better:
+either your grandparent or the duchess would be a villainous person, and
+the other a victim. I'm inclined to think that most of the ideas about
+life and conduct are lifted from cheap fiction. They have the look of
+it. But that realization wouldn't help us, with the world entirely on
+the other side."
+
+"No, it isn't," Claire objected; "and it's getting less so all around
+us. Perhaps men haven't changed much, yet; but you don't hear the women
+talk as I do. I don't like them, as I said; they are too damned skulking
+for me; but they are gathering a lot more sense in a short while."
+
+"I don't agree with you there," he replied; "you are getting your own
+infinitesimal world confused with the real overwhelming majority; you
+haven't an idea how it feels and, in particular, of what it thinks
+of you, smoking and gambling and damning your fate. It may be largely
+envy--personally I am convinced it is--but they have you ticketed
+straight for hell just the same."
+
+"It doesn't interest me." Claire increasingly showed the strain, the
+unhappiness, through which she was parsing. Nor did it him, he ended
+lamely, except in the abstract. This at once had the elements of a lie
+and the unelaborate truth; he couldn't see how his curiosity applied
+to him, and yet he was intent on its solving. The fixed mobile smile of
+Cytherea flashed into his thoughts. His perpetual restlessness struck
+through him.
+
+His attitude toward the Morrises was largely dictated by his fondness
+for Claire. He had determined what, exactly, he would say to Peyton.
+Yet, as a fact, he returned to his former assertion to Fanny; the boy
+would make it difficult, if not impossible, to discuss such intimate
+relationships. And as Claire had pointed out, the very openness
+of Peyton's life would make him exceptionally far to reach; he was
+particularly youthful in his hardness, his confidence in his acts and
+friends and beliefs; yet all that couldn't help but be upset now.
+
+"Fanny will think I have designs on you," Claire remarked; "go up when
+you like. I am not a bit sleepy."
+
+Lee had no intention of going to bed then, and told her so. It seemed to
+him that, perhaps, with Claire, he might discover something that would
+set his questioning at rest. Vain delusion. He asked what her plans
+were:
+
+"I'll stay in Eastlake for the winter, and, in March, go to Italy, to
+give Peyton his divorce--Florence; I lived a while at Arcetri; it's very
+lovely."
+
+He had a momentary experimental vision of a small yellow villa among
+the olives of the Florentine hills, of crumbling pink walls with
+emerald green lizards along the stones, of myrtles and remarkable
+lilies-of-the-valley. Twenty years ago it would have drawn him
+irresistibly; but not now; he wanted--where his wants were articulate--a
+far different thing. It had nothing to do with Italy, or any other
+country; his intentness had been withdrawn from the surfaces of life,
+however charming; they had plunged into the profounder mysteries of
+being. Lee had gained nothing if not a certain freedom from exterior
+circumstance; his implied revolt against trivialities, if it did no
+other good, had at least liberated him from the furniture of existence.
+However, it had begun to appear that this was not an unmixed blessing;
+he had the uncomfortable sensation of having put out, on a limitless
+sea, in a very little boat too late to arrive at any far hidden
+desirable coast.
+
+Claire shivered, and, discovering that she was cold, he insisted on
+her going upstairs. "To my pure sheets," she said, with a touch of her
+familiar daring. Left alone, Lee was depressed by the hour; the room,
+his house, seemed strange, meaningless, to him. There was a menace in
+the unnatural stillness; Fanny's unfinished handkerchief, her stool,
+were without the warmth of familiar association. It might have been a
+place into which he had wandered by accident, where he didn't belong,
+wouldn't stay. It was inconceivable that, above him, his wife and
+children were sleeping; the ceiling, the supine heavy bodies, seemed to
+sag until they rested on his shoulders; he was, like Atlas, holding
+the whole house up. It was with acute difficulty that he shook off the
+illusion, the weight. From outside came the thin howling of a dog, and
+it, too, seemed to hold a remote and desperate interrogation.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+He slept badly, in short broken stretches, with the Morrises constantly
+in his mind; and what, in the slightest dislocation of reality, was
+dream and what waking he couldn't determine; at times his vision
+seemed to hold both--a door, the irrevocable door, swung open, the end
+impended, but he was unable to see the faces of the man and woman;
+when he looked anxiously a blind spot intervened. The morning found him
+unrefreshed, impatient; and he was glad that his early breakfast was
+solitary; Lee didn't want then to see either Claire or Fanny, he was in
+no mood to discuss Peyton's seizure. That, it seemed to Lee Randon, was
+exactly what had happened to the younger man--Peyton had gone within the
+region of a contagious fever that had run through all his blood.
+
+Yet, at dinner, to his surprise, Fanny said very little about what had
+entirely occupied their thoughts; she was quiet, reserved; her attitude
+was marked by a careful dignity. Her gaze, even more than commonly,
+rested on her husband. "I had a wretched night, too," she told him; "my
+head is like a kite. I've thought and thought until my brain aches, it
+is so full. But there are some things I decided; and if you don't agree
+with them I'm sorry; because, Lee, I am right, I am indeed."
+
+"Of course you are," he replied; "but, possibly, only for yourself. I
+mean, for instance, that you can't be sure you're right for Claire."
+
+"No, no, that's just the same as saying there isn't any right or wrong
+at all, and you know better. Yes, what I am certain about is duty; you
+must do that before everything else. Peyton's duty is to Claire and
+their child. It is as clear as this soup. Nothing else matters so much,
+or at all. Why, Lee, the world is made up of people doing their duty;
+what, I'd like to know, would become of it if they didn't? You don't
+seem to realize it, but there are loads of obligations I get dreadfully
+tired of, like the Social Service when it is my month to follow the
+accounts, and visits to Annie Hazard who has a cancer of the stomach and
+is dying, and thinking every day what to get you and the children and
+the servants to eat. Suppose, some morning, I didn't stir, but just
+rested in bed--what would happen? What did happen last winter when I
+had pleurisy? Why, the whole house went to pieces, and, when you
+weren't worrying about me, while I was getting well, you were the
+most uncomfortable man imaginable. I don't want you to think I am
+complaining, or that I don't love every minute and stick and stone of my
+home and life; I do. But you seem to forget about me ... that's because
+the house goes along so smoothly. It would be a good lesson if you had
+to live with some other woman for a while."
+
+"I'm sure every word is so," he returned; "no one could have a better
+wife; you've spoiled me outrageously; I feel like that pig Christopher
+has in a pen out by the stable."
+
+"You might think of something nicer to say," she protested. "You're not
+easy to live with, either," Fanny continued; "you hardly ever agree with
+what other people think; and you curse fearfully. I wish you wouldn't
+swear like that, Lee. I object to it very much in Claire; I can't help
+believing that she thinks it is smart or funny. And you encourage her.
+If Claire had been different--no, don't interrupt me--this would never
+have happened. You may say what you like about her good breeding: she's
+been too flippant. I felt that last night. Claire doesn't accept her
+obligations seriously enough. She's kept herself lovely looking, but
+that isn't the whole thing."
+
+"What is the whole thing?" he demanded.
+
+"I've told you, but you won't listen--duty."
+
+"You put that above all the rest?"
+
+Fanny hesitated. "I said my head hurt because I've thought so much. Love
+and duty, yes; I see them as the same. Duty without love would be hard,
+and there isn't any love without duty." Fanny evidently grew aware of
+her threatening incoherence. "It isn't necessary to tell you in so many
+words," she said defensively; "you are only being contrary."
+
+"You have explained yourself beautifully," he hastened to assure her; "I
+am the person who is at sea."
+
+"Why, Lee!" she exclaimed, surprised; "I don't know anyone who is so
+decided. That's what makes me raging, you're so dogmatic. There, that
+is a splendid word. Don't eat that apple, it isn't baked; I can see from
+here." She rang. "Varney," Fanny addressed the maid, "take Mr. Randon's
+apple out and see if there isn't another better done, please. I warned
+you about that; he can't eat them uncooked."
+
+"Let me keep it," he protested; "it might have an excellent effect on my
+disposition."
+
+"Don't interfere, Lee," she responded coldly: "yes, Varney. It's really
+idiotic of you," she turned to him; "you are not a boy any more, you're
+not even a young man, and you can't take liberties with your digestion.
+You are quite like Helena with her prayers--if she feels very well she's
+apt to forget them, but if she's sick she says them as hard as possible.
+I wish she were like Gregory."
+
+"Gregory and you are cut out of the same gold cloth," Lee Randon
+pronounced.
+
+"That was lovely of you, Lee." Fanny radiated happiness. "No one could
+say anything prettier to his old wife." Dinner was over, and, rising,
+she walked around the table and laid a confident arm on his shoulders.
+The knife-like tenderness which, principally, he had for her overwhelmed
+him; and he held Fanny against him in a silent and straining embrace.
+For that reason he was annoyed at himself when, sitting through an
+uneventful evening, his simile of the pig, enormously fat, sleepily
+contented, in its pen, returned to him. It wasn't that he found an
+actual analogy between the pig and life, individuals, on a higher plane,
+so much as that he was vaguely disturbed by the impression that there
+was an ultimate similitude between him, Lee Randon, and a fattened
+somnolence of existence.
+
+After all, were his individual opinions and doubts expressed in a manner
+forceful enough to diversify him from a porcine apathy? The pig, secure
+against the inequalities of fate and weather, wallowed through life with
+a dull fullness of food as regular as the solar course. Christopher was
+his wife. Now that, Lee told himself, with a vision of the gardener's
+moustache, sadly drooping and stained with tobacco, his pale doubtful
+gaze, was inexcusable. He abruptly directed his thoughts to Peyton
+and Claire Morris; how exact Claire had been in the expression of her
+personality! What, he grasped, was different in her from other women was
+precisely that; together with an astonishing lack of sentimental bias,
+it operated with the cutting realism of a surgeon's blade. She had, as
+well, courage.
+
+That was the result of her heritage; and he wondered if all strong
+traits were the action of superior blood strayed into expected and
+unexpected places? It was probable, but not susceptible of proof. The
+pig's blood was that of the best registered Berkshire. God damn the pig!
+
+He asked Fanny if she had heard any further particulars of the proposed
+rearrangement of the Morrises' lives; when they were to separate;
+but she knew no more than he. "I hope he doesn't come here," she said
+vigorously: "I should refuse to speak to him or have him at my table.
+Outrageous! I can't make out why you take it so coolly. Mina Raff's a
+rotten immoral woman; it doesn't matter how it's arranged. Why," she
+gasped, "she can be no more than Peyton's mistress, no better than the
+women on the street."
+
+"That is so," he agreed. But his following question of the accepted
+badness of mistresses and streetwalkers he wisely kept to himself.
+Were they darker than the shadow cast by the inelastic institution of
+matrimony? At one time prostitutes were greatly honored; but that had
+passed, he was convinced, forever; and this, on the whole, he
+concluded, was fortunate; for, perhaps, if prostitution were thoroughly
+discredited, marriage might, in some Elysian future, be swept of most of
+its rubbish. Houses of prostitution, mistresses, like charity, absorbed
+and dissipated a great deal of the dissatisfaction inseparable from the
+present misconceptions of love and society. The first move, obviously,
+in stopping war was the suppression of such ameliorating forces as
+the Red Cross; and, conversely, with complete unions, infidelity would
+languish and disappear.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+He thought of this further in the darkened theatre to which, driven by
+his growing curiosity, he had gone to see Mina Raff in the leading part
+of a moving picture. It was a new version, in a new medium, of an old
+and perennial melodrama; but, too late for the opening scenes, the story
+for the moment was incomprehensible to him. However, it had to do with
+the misadventures of a simple country girl in what, obviously, was
+the conventional idea of a most sophisticated and urbane society.
+Lee waited, and not vainly, to see the feminine grub transformed, by
+brilliant clothes, into a butterfly easily surpassing all the select
+glittering creatures of the city; and he told himself that, personally,
+he vastly preferred Mina Raff in her plainest dress.
+
+It was strange--seeing her there; while, in fact, she was in New York
+with far different things occupying her thoughts. Here she was no more
+than an illusion, a pattern, without substance, of projected light
+and shade; she had neither voice nor warmth nor color; only the most
+primitive minds could be carried away, lost, in the convention of her
+flat mobile effigy! Yet, after a little, he found that he as well was
+absorbed in the atmosphere of emotional verity she created. It was
+clear to him now that not the Mina Raff in New York, but this, was the
+important reality. In herself she was little compared to what she so
+miraculously did. Then--the final step in a surrender, however much
+he hated the word, to art--he forgot Mina Raff completely. He lost her
+partly in his own mental processes and partly in the unhappy girl she
+was portraying:
+
+It was an uncomplicated story of betrayal, of a marriage that was no
+marriage, and the birth, in circumstances of wretched loneliness, of
+an illegitimate baby. The father annoyed Lee excessively; he was the
+anciently familiar inaccurate shape of conventionalized lust without
+an identifying human trait. Not for a second did Lee believe in his
+grease-pencilled incontinence and perfidy; but the child he seduced,
+incidents of the seduction charged with the beauty of pity, thronged
+Lee's mind with sensations and ideas. However, it was the world
+surrounding the central motive, the action, that most engaged him;
+hardly a trait of generosity dignified it; and, exaggeratedly as a
+universal meanness and self-righteous cruelty was shown, it scarcely
+departed, he felt, from the truth.
+
+Why was it that virtue, continence, corroded the heart? Why did people
+who, through predilection, went to churches, regard those who didn't
+with such an insistent animosity? Why did the church itself seek to
+obliterate--as though they were a breathing menace--all who stood
+outside its doors? There was something terribly wrong in the reaction of
+life to religion, or in the religion that was applied to life. It
+began, in the symbolical person of Christ, with, at least, a measure
+of generosity; but that had been long lost. Now the bitterness of the
+religious rather resembled envy.
+
+In the picture flickering on the screen the girl who had suffered the
+agonies of birth sat, with her baby on her young lap, in the forlorn
+room of a village boarding house. The baby was sick, a doctor had left
+shortly before, and one minute clenched hand rested on the mother's bare
+breast. Lee found himself gazing fixedly at the girl's face: trouble
+slowly clouded it, the trouble was invaded by fear, a terrible question.
+He realized that the hand was growing cold--the baby was dead.
+
+Waves of suffering passed darkly over the mother, incredulity swiftly
+followed by a frozen knowledge; she tried with her lips, her mouth, to
+breath life into the flesh already meaningless, lost to her. Then the
+tragedy of existence drew her face into a mask universal and timeless,
+a staring tearless shocked regard as white and inhuman as plaster of
+Paris. Emotion choked at Lee's throat; and, in a sense of shame at
+having been so shaken, he admitted that Mina Raff had an extraordinary
+ability: he evaded the impressive reality by a return to the trivial
+fact. In the gloom there was only a scattering of applause, a failure
+of approbation caused either by an excess of emotion in the audience,
+or--this he thought more probable--a general uneasiness before a great
+moment of life. The crowded theatre was wholly relieved, itself again,
+in a succeeding passage of trivial clowning.
+
+Hatred pursued the youthful informally maternal figure: that,
+eventually, she was saved by the love of an individual was small before
+the opposed mass--women surrounded her with vitriolic whispers, women
+turned her maliciously from house to house, a woman had betrayed her.
+Finally the tide of Christianity rose, burst, in a biblical father
+who drove her into a night of snow that was a triumph of the actual
+substituted for the cut paper of stage convention. That she would be
+rescued, no doubt was permitted; and Lee took no part in the storm of
+applause which greeted this act of satisfactory heroics.
+
+The other spirit had appalled him: in his state of mental doubt--it
+might equally have been a condition of obscure hope--he had been rudely
+shoved toward pessimism; the converse of the announced purpose of the
+picture. The audience, for one thing, was so depressingly wrong in the
+placing of its merriment: it laughed delightedly at a gaunt feminine
+vindictiveness hurrying through the snow on an errand of destruction.
+The fact that the girl's maternity was transcendent in a generous and
+confident heart, made lovely by spiritual passion, escaped everyone. The
+phrase, spiritual passion, had occurred to him without forethought
+and he wondered if it were permissible, if it meant anything? It did
+decidedly to him; he told himself further that it was the fusion of
+the body and all the aspirations called spirit in one supreme act of
+feeling.
+
+It had been his and Fanny's ... at first. Then the spirit, though it
+had lingered in other relationships, had deserted the consummation of
+passion. That hadn't grown perfunctory, but it became a thing more and
+more strictly of the flesh; with this it was less thrilling. There, he
+believed, they were not singular; or, anyhow, he wasn't; he saw what he
+was convinced was the same failure in the men past youth about him. But
+in Fanny there was, he recognized, that fierce if narrow singleness of
+impulse, of purity. His thoughts of other women were not innocent of
+provocative conjecture--Anette's sinuous body, now as dead to him as
+Alohabad, recurred to his mind--but in this Fanny was utterly loyal.
+Yes, she had, a thing impossible for any man he had known, a mental
+singleness of desire.
+
+Was it that which had in her an affinity with the oppressors of the
+picture, which made her, mechanically, the vigorously enlisted enemy
+of the actual Mina Raff? It startled him a little to realize that
+Fanny--for all her marked superiority--was definitely arrayed with the
+righteous mob. She was sorry for those who failed in the discharge of
+duty to God and man, and she worked untiringly to reinstate them--in
+her good opinion. That was it, and it was no more! All such attempted
+salvation resolved itself into the mere effort to drag men up to the
+complacent plane of the incidental savior.
+
+This recognition took a great deal of the vigor from his intended
+conversation with Peyton Morris: anything in the way of patronage,
+he reflected, would be as useless as it would be false. But he had no
+impulse to forego his purpose; he was engaged to help Claire who was
+too proud to help herself; yes, by heaven, and too right for the least
+humiliation. If Claire suffered, it must be because the world was too
+inferior for hope of any kind.
+
+Lee was not unaware of the incongruity of his position, for he was
+equally ignoring the needs of two others, Peyton and Mina Raff. It was
+evident to him now, since he had seen her in a picture, that she was
+well worth the greatest consideration. She lay outside the stream of
+ordinary responsibilities. What held him steady was the belief that she
+and Peyton were not so important to each other as they thought; Claire
+needed him more badly than Mina. There was a possibility--no, it was
+probable--that Claire deserted would develop into an individual as empty
+and as vacantly sounding as a drum. She had said as much. Her heritage,
+together with its splendors of courage and charm, signally carried that
+menace.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+So much, joined to what already was thronging his thoughts, brought
+Lee's mind to resemble the sheet of an enormous ledger covered with a
+jumble of figures apparently beyond any reduction to an answer. He was
+considering Claire and Mina Raff, Mina and Claire, at a hunt breakfast
+at Willing Spencer's in Nantbrook Valley, north of Eastlake, when,
+with a plate of food in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other, he
+collided with Peyton Morris, his face pinched and his eyes dull from
+a lack of rest. The Spencer house was sparely furnished, a square
+unimpressive dwelling principally adapted to the early summers of its
+energetic children; and Peyton and Lee Randon allowed themselves to be
+crowded into the bare angle formed by a high inner door.
+
+"Claire told you," the younger said.
+
+"Yes," Lee replied briefly. It wouldn't, after all, be difficult to talk
+to Peyton; he was obviously miserable from the necessity of suppressing
+what absorbed his entire consciousness.
+
+"Well, I suppose you think there's nothing to be said for me," his voice
+was defiant; "and that I ought to be shot."
+
+"Very much to the contrary," Lee asserted; "there is so much to say
+that it's difficult to know where to begin. With another situation
+practically the same, I might have agreed with you thoroughly; but, with
+Claire and what I have gathered of you, in this special one I can't."
+
+"It isn't absolutely necessary," the other pointed out; "Mina and I will
+have a lot to ignore."
+
+"The first thing you'll have to manage," Lee observed sharply, "is to
+grow up. You are not in a place to be helped by leather-headed satire
+and visions of solitary grandeur. My interest comes only from Claire and
+some personal curiosity; Mina Raff doesn't require anyone's assistance.
+Of you all, her position is clearest. I don't know if you can be brought
+to see it, but this is only incidental, a momentary indulgence, with
+her."
+
+"What you don't seem to get," Peyton told him, with a brutally cold
+face, "is that I may smash you; now, where you are."
+
+"That was possible," Lee agreed; "and you are right--I had overlooked
+it. I think that's passed, though; I'm going to keep on as if it were.
+Why, you young fool, you seem to have no conception, none in the world,
+of what you propose to do. In a week, in your frame of mind, you'd have
+a hundred fights; there would be time for nothing else but knocking out
+the men who insulted you. You'll collapse over Sunday if you are not
+absolutely and totally impervious to everything and everybody. The only
+way you can throw the world over is to ignore it; while you appear to
+have the idea that it should put a rose in your buttonhole."
+
+"You don't have to tell me it's going to be stiff," Peyton Morris
+asserted gloomily. "I can take care of that. Claire and Ira are the hard
+part. Lee, if anyone a year ago had said that I was like this, that
+I was even capable of it, I'd have ruined him. God, what a thing to
+happen! I want you to understand that we, Mina and I, didn't have a
+particle to do with it--it just flatly occurred. I had seen her only
+three times when it was too late; and if you think I didn't try to break
+it, and myself, too--"
+
+Lee nodded. "Certainly. Why not, since it's bound to knock you on the
+head? You've been very unfortunate: I can't imagine a man to whom this
+would come worse."
+
+"If I can make Mina happy I don't care about myself."
+
+"Of course, that is understood," Lee Randon returned impatiently; "it
+is nothing but sentimental rot, all the same. If you are not contented,
+easy in mind, how can she be happy? You have got to believe entirely in
+what you are doing, it must be right to you on every possible side; and
+you can't make that grade, Peyton; you are too conventional underneath."
+
+"Sink your spurs in me," he said doggedly; "it's funny when you really
+think about it. Why, only a little while ago, if I had heard of a man
+doing this, I would have beaten him up just on general principles:
+running away from his wife and child, with another woman, an actress,
+that's what it is! I tell myself that, but the words haven't a trace of
+meaning or importance. Somehow, they don't seem to apply to me, to us;
+they can say what they like, but Mina isn't wicked. She--she loves me,
+Lee; and, suddenly, that swept everything else out of sight.
+
+"But go back to me--you realize that I was rather in favor of what I
+was, what I had. Brandenhouse is a good school and my crowd ran it. We
+were pretty abrupt with boys who whored about; and, at Princeton, well,
+we thought we were it. We were, still, there; and I got a heavy idea of
+what I liked and was like. We were very damned honorable and the icing
+on the cake generally. That was good after I left college, too; but
+what's the use of going into it; I was in the same old Brandenhouse
+surrounding. The war split us wide open. Or I thought it did; but, Lee,
+by God, I don't believe it changed a thing. I got my touch of concussion
+early, Ira was born, and, and--"
+
+"Disaster," Lee Randon pronounced shortly.
+
+"Call it that if you choose; there isn't much use in calling it at all:
+it simply is."
+
+"With someone else, yes; but with you, no, not finally; you haven't
+the character and disposition to get away with it. You don't, secretly,
+approve of yourself, Peyton; and that will be fatal. The truth is that,
+while you want this now, in a year, or two years, or five, you'll demand
+the other. You think it is going to be different from everything else
+in heaven and earth, you're convinced it's going to stay all in the sky;
+but it will be on the solid familiar ground. Understand again--it isn't
+your plan I'm attacking; but your ability; that and your real ignorance
+of Mina Raff.
+
+"If you imagine for an instant that this love will be bigger than her
+work, if you suppose that, against her acting, it will last, you are
+an idiot for your pains. If I don't know the side of her you do, I have
+become fairly familiar with one you haven't dreamed of. She is a greater
+actress than people yet recognize, principally because of the general
+doubt about moving pictures; but that recognition will come, and, when
+it does, you will be swept out of sight.
+
+"No, you haven't the slightest suspicion of what it is about; that side
+of her, and it's very nearly the whole woman, is a blank. She admitted
+to me that she couldn't understand it herself. But what she is doing is
+dragging into her genius what it needs. She loves you now, and tomorrow
+she'll love a Belgian violinist, a great engineer, a Spanish prince at
+San Sebastian. How will you take sitting in the salon and hearing them
+padding around over your head? It's no good your getting mad at me; I am
+not blaming Mina Raff; you are. I admire her tremendously.
+
+"In the beginning I said she could watch out for herself, and I
+intimated that I was reasonably indifferent to what happened to you: it
+is Claire I am concerned about. Unfortunately for her, and without much
+reason, she loves you too. When Mina is done with you and you stray
+back, from, perhaps, South America, Claire won't be here. I don't
+mean that she will have gone away, or be dead in the familiar sense.
+I haven't any doubt but that she would live with you again--she is not
+small-minded and she's far more unconventional than you--what there was
+of her."
+
+"If you or anyone else thinks that I don't admire Claire--" he stopped
+desperately. "We won't get far talking," Peyton added; "even if all you
+have said is a fact. You can't hit on much that I've missed. You might
+just as well curse me and let me go."
+
+"Nothing of the sort," Lee Randon returned equably; "that's exactly what
+I have no intention of doing. In the interest of Claire I must try to
+open your eyes." The younger man said indignantly:
+
+"You talk as though I were a day-old kitten. It's cursed impertinent: I
+don't seem to remember asking for so much advice."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Throughout their conversation they were both holding the plates of
+sausage and scrambled eggs, from which rose a pungent odor, inevitable
+to the occasion. And, in a silence which fell upon them, Lee realized
+the absurdity of their position behind the door. "We can't keep this
+up," he declared, and moved into the eddying throng, the intermingling
+ceaseless conversations. Almost at once Peyton Morris disappeared, and
+Lee found Fanny at his shoulder. Neither of them fox-hunted, although
+they hacked a great deal over the country roads and fields, and they
+had ridden to the Spencers' that morning. Fanny wore dark brown and a
+flattened hunting derby which, with her hair in a short braid tied by a
+stiff black ribbon, was particularly becoming. She was, he told himself,
+with her face positively animated, sparkling, from talk, unusually
+attractive. Fanny was like that--at times she was singularly engaging.
+
+"What did he say?" she demanded, nodding in the direction in which
+Peyton had disappeared. "I have avoided him all morning."
+
+"An uncommon lot for Peyton," Lee acknowledged. "I almost think he has
+been jarred out of his self-complacency. But, on the whole, that is
+not possible. It's temporary with him. At one time I thought--in the
+language of youth--he was going to crown me."
+
+"The little beast!" she exclaimed viciously. "If he had I'd have made
+him sorry. I saw Claire a few minutes ago, and she asked me to tell
+you, if she missed you, that she had something for you to see. Wasn't
+it strange that she said nothing to me about it? I should think, in her
+scrape, she'd rather turn to a woman than to a man. But Claire isn't
+very feminine: I've always felt her hardness."
+
+"Then that's why she didn't speak to you," Lee assented superficially.
+"I'll go over tonight, after dinner. They must be pretty nearly ready to
+drop the fox, and it's beginning to drizzle."
+
+There was, soon after that, an exodus from the back of the house to the
+fields beyond. It was a very fair hunting country, rolling and clear of
+brush, with grouped woods on the surrounding hills and streams in the
+swales below. The clouds were broken and aqueous, and the grass held
+a silver veil of fine raindrops. Only an inconsiderable part of those
+present were following the hounds; the others, in a restricted variety
+of sporting garb--the men in knickerbockers and gaiters or riding
+breeches, the women breeched and severely coated or swathed in wide
+reddish tweed capes--stood, with a scattering of umbrellas and upturned
+collars, in a semi-circle on the soggy turf.
+
+There was a baying of hounds from the direction of the stables, and
+the Master swung up on a bright chestnut horse with a braided tail.
+A huntsman appeared with a shuttered box, holding the fox, and an old
+brown and white hound bitch, wise with many years of hunting, to follow
+and establish and announce the scent. "If you are ready, Brace," the
+Master said to his huntsman, "you may drop." A stable boy held the
+hound, and, raising the shutter, Brace shook the fox out on the ground.
+
+The animal--in view of the commotion about to pursue it--was
+surprisingly small, slim flanked; proportionately the tail seemed
+extravagant. "I hope the brush won't get wet," a man behind Lee spoke;
+"when it does they can't run." As it was, the fox, obviously, was
+reluctant to start; it crouched in the rough grass and glanced fleetly
+around with incredibly sharp black eyes. The men shouted and flung up
+their arms; but the animal was indifferent to their laudable efforts.
+The hunt, Lee Randon thought, had assumed an aspect of the ridiculous;
+the men and women on expensive excited horses, the pack yelping from
+beyond a road, the expectant on-lookers, were mocked by the immobility
+of the puzzled subject of the chase. Finally the fox obligingly moved a
+few steps; it hesitated again, and then trotted forward, slipping under
+a fence. Lee could follow it clearly across the next field and into the
+next; its progress was unhurried, deliberate, insolent.
+
+"Give him six minutes," the Master decided.
+
+When the time had gone the leash of the single hound was slipped. She
+ran around in a circle, whining eagerly, her nose to the sod, and then
+with a high yelp, set smartly off in a direction absolutely opposite to
+that taken by the fox. She was brought back and her nose held to the hot
+scent; again, with a fresh assurance, the bitch gave tongue, followed
+the trail to where it went under the fence, and turned, instead of
+bearing to the right, to the left. There were various exclamations. A
+kennel man declared, "She knows what she's about, and the fox will swing
+into Sibley's Cover." Someone else more sceptically asserted that the
+hound was a fool. Her sustained cry floated back from under the hill;
+and, in another minute, the pack, the hunt, was off. The horses rose
+gracefully in a sleek brown tide over the first fence; and then there
+was a division--the hounds scattered and bunched and scattered, some of
+the riders went to the left after the palpable course of the fox, others
+pounded direct for Sibley's Cover, and the remainder reined up over the
+hounds.
+
+Although long association and familiarity had made such scenes a piece
+with Lee Randon's subconsciousness, today the hunt seemed nothing more
+than nonsense. He laughed, and made a remark of disparaging humor; but
+he found no support. Willing Spencer, kept out of the field by a broken
+collar bone, gazed at him with lifted eyebrows. Fanny and Lee turned
+to their horses, held for them by a groom at a mounting block, and went
+home. The rain had increased, but, not cold, Lee found it pleasant on
+his face. They jogged quietly over the roads bordered with gaunt sombre
+hedges, through the open countryside, into Eastlake.
+
+Nothing, he realized, had been accomplished with Peyton Morris; the
+other was too numbed, shocked, by the incredible accident that had
+overtaken him to listen to reason. Lee felt that he could hardly have
+said more. He wondered what Claire had to show him. Still, he wasn't
+through with her husband; he had no intention of resting until every
+hope was exhausted. What particularly impressed him--he must speak of it
+to Peyton--was that no matter where Morris might get he would find life
+monotonously the same. It was very much like mountain climbing--every
+peak looked different, more iridescent and desirable, from the one
+occupied; but, gazing back, that just left appeared as engaging, as
+rare, as any in the distance. Every experience in the life surrounding
+him was the same as all the others; no real change was offered, because
+the same dull response permeated all living; no escape such as Peyton
+planned was possible.
+
+Escape, Lee Randon continued, happened within; it was not, he repeated,
+a place on earth, or any possession, but a freedom, a state, of mind.
+Peyton Morris, while it was quite possible for him to be destroyed, was
+incapable of mental liberty, readjustments; he might drive himself on
+the rocks, on the first reef where he disregarded the clamor of warning
+bells and carefully charted directions, but he was no Columbus for the
+discovery of a magical island, a Cuba, of spices and delectable
+palms. Peyton had looked with a stolid indifference at the dangerously
+fascinating, the incomprehensible, smile of Cytherea. Yes, if the young
+donkey could be forced past this tempting patch of grazing, if he could
+only be driven a short distance farther down the highway of custom,
+Claire would be safe.
+
+But she must be made to think that such a conclusion had been purely
+the result of Peyton's reserved strength, and not of a mere negative
+surrender following doubt. And, above all, there must be no appearance
+of Mina Raff having, after a short trial, herself discarded him. On such
+trivialities Claire's ultimate happiness might hang. Truth was once
+more wholly restrained, hidden, dissimulated; the skillful shifting of
+painted masks, false-faces, continued uninterrupted its progress. A new
+lethargy enveloped Lee: his interest, his confidence, in what he was
+trying to prevent waned. What did it matter who went and who stayed? In
+the end it was the same, unprofitable and stale. All, probably, that his
+thought had accomplished was to rob his ride of its glow, make flat the
+taste of the whiskey and charged water he prepared. However, shortly
+a pervading warmth--but it was of the spirits--brought back his lately
+unfamiliar sense of well-being.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The Morrises lived in a large remodelled brick house, pleasantly
+pseudo-classic, beyond the opposite boundary of Eastlake; and, leaving
+his car in the turn of the drive past the main door, Lee walked into the
+wide hall which swept from front to back, and found a small dinner party
+at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. It was composed, he saw at
+once, of Peyton's friends; as he entered three young men rose
+punctiliously--Christian Wager, with hair growing close like a mat on a
+narrow skull and a long irregular nose; Gilbert Bromhead, a round figure
+and a face with the contours and expression, the fresh color, of
+a pleasant and apple-like boy; and Peyton. They had been at their
+university together; and, Lee Randon saw, they were making, with a
+characteristic masculine innocence, an effort to secure their wives in
+the same bond of affectionate understanding that held them.
+
+Claire, who had smiled acknowledgingly with her eyes when Lee
+approached, returned to a withdrawn concentration upon the section of
+table-cloth immediately before her; she answered the remarks directed
+to her with a temporary measure of animation vanishing at once with the
+effort. Christian Wager, who was in London with a branch of an American
+banking firm, had married an English girl strikingly named Evadore.
+She was large, with black hair cut in a scanty bang; but beyond these
+unastonishing facts there was nothing in her appearance to mark or
+remember. However, a relative of hers, he had been told, distant but
+authentic, had been a lady-in-waiting to the Queen. Gilbert Bromhead's
+wife was southern, a small appealing compound of the essence of the
+superlatively feminine.
+
+Lee Randon, in a chair drawn up for him at the table, studied the women,
+arbitrarily thrown together, with a secret entertainment. Evadore Wager
+was frankly--to a degree almost Chinese--curious about the others. At
+short regular intervals, in a tone of unvaried timbre and inexhaustible
+surprise, she half exclaimed, "Fancy." Claire was metallic, turned
+in, with an indifference to her position that was actually rude, upon
+herself. But Mrs. Gilbert Bromhead made up for any silence around her
+in a seductive, low-pitched continuous talking. A part of this was
+superficially addressed to Claire and the solidly amazed Evadore;
+but all its underlying intention, its musical cadences and breathless
+suspensions for approval, were flung at the men. The impression she
+skillfully conveyed to Lee Randon, by an art which never for an
+instant lost its aspect of the artless, was that he, at least, older in
+experience than the rest there, alone entirely understood and engaged
+her.
+
+The men--even Peyton, temporarily--resting confident on a successful
+bringing of their wives into the masculine simplicity of their common
+memories and affection, said little. With eyes puckered wisely against
+the cigarette smoke they made casual remarks about their present
+occupations and terse references to companions and deeds of the
+past. Only Peyton had been of any athletic importance; he had played
+university foot-ball; and, in view of this, there was still a tinge of
+respect in Bromhead's manner. A long run of Peyton's, crowned with a
+glorious and winning score, was recalled. But suddenly it failed to stir
+him. "How young we were then," he observed gloomily.
+
+Christian Wager protested. "That isn't the right tone. We were young
+then, true, but Princeton was teaching us what it meant to be men.
+In that game, Morris, you got something invaluable to you now, hard
+endurance and fairness--"
+
+"In my day," Lee interposed, "the team was told to sink a heel in any
+back that looked a little too good for us."
+
+"There were instructors like that," Gilbert Bromhead assented; "and some
+graduate coaches are pretty cunning; but they are being discredited."
+
+Wager largely, obliviously, passed over this interruption. "We learned
+decency," he proceeded, "in business and ideals and living; and to give
+and take evenly. In the war and in civil life we were and are behind the
+big issues. This new license and socialistic rant, the mental and moral
+bounders, must be held down, and we are the men to do it. Yes, and I
+believe in the church, the right church, we're all for that: I tell you
+the country depends on the men the best colleges turn out."
+
+"My God, Christian, you must have made a lot of money lately," Bromhead
+observed. "You talk exactly like the president of a locomotive works.
+You have been dining with the best, too; I can tell that with certainty.
+Answer us this, honestly--do you mention the Royal Family in your
+prayers?"
+
+Evadore laughed. "Do you know, that's really awfully good. He does put
+it on a bit, doesn't he?"
+
+"If you let Christian go on," Peyton added, "he'll talk about the sacred
+ties of Anglo-Saxon blood and tradition, with the English and American
+exchange ruling the world. Gilbert, how did your artillery company get
+along with the Londoners?"
+
+"All right, if we were near a brick yard."
+
+Claire rose abruptly, and they drifted out to a reception room opening,
+with a wide arch, beyond the hall. Gilbert Bromhead's wife hesitated;
+then, confidentially, she told Lee that she adored to sit on stairs.
+"Very well," he assented; "these of the Morrises' are splendid." He was
+a step below her, and her knees and his shoulder settled together.
+
+"I like older men so much," she admitted what she had already
+so adroitly conveyed; "patches of grey above the ears are so
+distinguished."
+
+"Older than what?"
+
+Apparently forgetful that her gesture included Gilbert Bromhead she
+indicated the rooms that now held the others. "Young men are so head
+over heels," she particularized; "they are always disarranging things."
+She laughed, a delectable sound. "I oughtn't to have said that, and I
+wouldn't--to them. I might almost tell you the story about the man
+in the department store and the drawers." Their contact was more
+pronounced. "Isn't that English girl extraordinary? I didn't believe for
+a minute that was her own color till I was close to it. Her hair isn't
+dyed; but why does she wear that skimpy bang?" Again she laughed, a
+pure golden melody. "But you admired it, I know you did; men are so
+unaccountable. Could you trust her, do you think? It wasn't very nice to
+make fun of her husband." Adroitly, without the flutter of a ruffle, she
+moved to a higher step, and Claire--before Lee had any premonition of
+her appearance--stood below them with chocolates.
+
+"She is rather attractive," his companion admitted, when Claire had
+gone. "She doesn't like me, or Mrs. Wager, though; and I must say she
+made it plain in her own house. I've been studying her, and there is
+something wrong. Is she happy with Peyton Morris? I thought he was
+right nice until you came." She turned for a better view, through the
+balustrade, of the doors beyond, and then drew her skirt close so that
+he could move up beside her. "It's just like a smoke-house in there,"
+she reported. "I don't truthfully think cigarettes are nice for a woman;
+and I wouldn't dream of taking whiskey; in the South we never. You'd
+call that out of date." She bent forward, arranging the ribbon of a
+slipper, and her mouth met his in a long kiss.
+
+"What made you suppose you could do that?" she demanded; "how did
+you know I wouldn't be cross with you? But ... somehow I didn't mind.
+Although you mustn't again, so publicly. I wonder why, with you, it
+seemed so perfectly nice, and not at all as if I had only met you?"
+
+There was a response to that as recognized, as exact, as the bishop's
+move in chess; indeed, it was expected of him; she was hesitating,
+waiting for it; but he was unable to reassure her with the conventional
+sentiment. A month ago he would have commanded and developed an enticing
+situation; but now, for Lee Randon, it was without possibilities, hardly
+more than perfunctory. A shade of vexation invaded her bearing, and
+she moved a significant infinitesimal fraction away from him. Then she
+discovered a wind blowing down the stairs. "I have to take such good
+care of myself," she told Lee, preparing to descend. "It is because I am
+so delicate--I can get upset at nothing. Here you are all so strong; you
+have an advantage over me. Gilbert, dear," she called from the hall, her
+voice musical with tender reproach, "I can't see how you love me, you
+stay away so far."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"What did the little ass say to you?" Claire asked. Lee was standing
+with her by the piano, and the others were around the fireplace in the
+farther spaciousness. "Nothing much," he replied. "You mean that she
+never stopped. I'll admit she's skillful; but she needn't think I'm a
+fool. But you will never guess what I want to tell you. My dear Lee,
+that Mrs. Grove wrote me a letter. I have it here in my dress, for you
+to read. It's a scream." He took the sheet of note paper: it was grey
+with an address on East Sixty-sixth Street embossed in pale vermilion,
+and had an indefinable scent. The writing was decisive:
+
+"MY DEAR MRS. MORRIS,
+
+"It is so difficult for me to express my disturbance at what Mina Raff
+has just told me, that I am asking to see you here, at my house in New
+York. Engagements make it difficult for me to leave at present. I hope
+you will not find this impertinent from an older woman, threatened very
+much as you in her affections by an impossible calamity--"
+
+The signature, Savina Grove, had the crispness of a name often attached
+to opinions and papers of authority.
+
+"That's rather cool," he agreed.
+
+"Cool! The woman's demented. No, I suppose she thinks I am an honest
+wronged woman or something objectionable of the sort. I was going to
+throw it away when I kept it to amuse you."
+
+"It does, Claire; and I'm glad to see it; impertinent as she admits it
+may be, you must consider. As Mrs. Grove writes, you are both caught."
+
+"If you think I'll go see her you are madder still."
+
+"I realize you won't; but worse things could happen. It's the only
+possible approach to Mina Raff; I had a chance to try Peyton, but it did
+no good. It seems to me this Mina ought to have some understanding."
+
+Claire Morris said: "You can do it."
+
+He reflected. "Well, perhaps; I'm your uncle; there are no brothers,
+and what other family you have is away. It might be useful. Anyhow, she
+would hear a thing or two about you from me."
+
+"Seriously, Lee, you'd only get angry: I can see Mrs. Grove as though
+she were in the room--the utmost New York self-satisfaction. And I won't
+have you discussing my affairs."
+
+"Absurd. A thousand people will be talking about them soon if this isn't
+managed. I have an idea I had better go to New York and try what can be
+done there. I got along well enough with the girl herself; and perhaps,
+though it's not likely, Mrs. Grove has some influence."
+
+"Of course, I can't stop you," Claire said; her hand strayed over his,
+on the piano. "I'm simply enraged at myself, Lee. Why, I should let him
+go with cheers--except where I was sorry for him--but I can't. He is
+such a sweet child; and, you see, he was all mine."
+
+"I can't leave before Thursday." He considered. "I'll have a wire sent
+to the Groves, say something regretful and polite about you--measles."
+
+"Don't bother," she returned.
+
+Peyton came stiffly up to them. "I happened to mention, Claire, that we
+had some champagne left, and it created the intensest excitement. I told
+them it would do no good, that you were keeping hold of it; but they
+insisted on a look at the bottles."
+
+"Get them, Peyton," she replied unhesitatingly. "I was keeping it, but
+perhaps for now. This is a very appropriate time for you and me, and the
+last of the cases left over from our wedding."
+
+An expression of pain tightened his mouth; he turned away without
+further speech. "We'll have it in the dining-room," Claire announced;
+"big glasses filled with ice." They gathered about the bare table, and
+Peyton Morris ranged the dark green bottles, capped in white foil, on
+the sideboard. He worked with a napkin at a cork: there was a restrained
+sibilant escaping pressure, and the liquid rose in frothing bubbles
+through the ice.
+
+It was, Lee thought, a golden drink, flooded, up to a variable point,
+with an inimitable gaiety. In comparison whiskey was brutalizing; sherry
+was involved with a number of material accompanying pleasures; port was
+purely masculine and clarets upset him; beer was a beverage and not a
+delight; ale a soporific; and Rhine wines he ignored. Champagne held
+in solution the rhythm of old Vienna waltzes, of ball rooms with
+formal greenery, floating with passions as light as the tarleton skirts
+floating about dancing feet. But it wasn't, he insisted, a wine for
+indiscriminate youth--youth that couldn't distinguish between the sweet
+and the dry. It was for men like himself, with memories, unrealized
+dreams. Ugly women, and women who were old, and certainly prudes, should
+never be given a sip.
+
+Peyton Morris again filled all the glasses; there was a clatter of
+talk, the accent of the South, about Lee; but he grew oblivious of
+it. Champagne always gave Fanny a headache; neither was it a drink for
+contented mothers, housewives. Contrarily, it was the ideal, the only,
+wine for seductions. It belonged most especially to masked balls, divine
+features vanishing under a provocative edge of black satin. He thought
+of little hidden tables and fantastic dresses, fragile emotion; lips and
+knees and garters. It all melted away before the intentness of Claire's
+expression. Peyton was doggedly holding to the rim of the table; Gilbert
+Bromhead was very close to Evadore; the black sheath of her hair had
+slipped and her eyes were blank; the blanched delicate hand of the South
+nearest Christian Wager had disappeared, Christian's hand on that side
+could not be seen. Peyton once more filled the glasses:
+
+"It must all go," Claire insisted; "I won't have a drop left."
+
+Wager's sentimentality overflowed in approved and well-established
+channels: Princeton was their mother, their sacred alma--alma mater.
+Here, under Peyton's roof, they had gathered to renew ... friendships
+unbroken with their wives, their true wives; oceans couldn't separate
+them, nor time, nor--nor silver locks among the gold. They must come to
+London next December: anniversary of mutual happiness and success. Take
+the children, the sons of old Princeton, to Christmas pantomine.
+
+"Once," Evadore told them, "I went to a night club. Do you know what
+that is, over here? I don't believe I can explain it; but there are
+quantities of champagne and men and principally girls; but they're not
+girls at all, if you see what I mean, not by several accidents. It would
+have been splendid, but I got sick, and it turned into a ghastly mess,
+mostly in the cab. That was rather thick, wasn't it?"
+
+Claire rose, and Lee Randon heard her say, under her breath, "Oh hell";
+but there was another full bottle, and she had to sit again. He had
+promised Fanny not to stay long, and, if he were coming home, she never
+went to sleep until he was in the house. Lee wasn't drunk, but then,
+he recognized, neither was he sober. Why should he be the latter? he
+demanded seriously of himself. His glass was empty, the champagne was
+all gone. Mrs. Gilbert Bromhead was perceptibly leaning on Christian
+Wager, her skill blurred; Evadore's face was damply pallid, her mouth
+slack; she left the table, the room, hurried and unsteady, evidently
+about to repeat the thickness of the act that had marred her enjoyment
+of the night club; Claire was openly contemptuous of them all.
+
+Outside, it had grown much colder, the ruts in the road were frozen,
+treacherous, but Lee Randon drove his car with a feeling of inattentive
+mastery. He saw some stars, an arc light, black patches of ice; and, as
+he increased his speed, he sang to an emphatic lifted hand of a being
+in the South Seas who wore leaves, plenty of leaves ... But none of the
+silly songs now could compare with--with the bully that, on the levees,
+he was going to cut down. However, in his house, he grew quiet. "Lee,"
+his wife called sleepily from their room, "you are so late, dear. I
+waited the longest while for some of the addresses for our Christmas
+cards. You must remember to give them to me tomorrow."
+
+Her voice, heavy with sleep and contentment and love, fell upon his
+hearing like the sound of a pure accusing bell. He wasn't fit to have a
+wife like Fanny, children as good as Helena and Gregory: he, Lee Randon,
+was a damned ingrate! That bloody doll--he had threatened to put it
+in the fire before--could now go where it belonged. But the hearth was
+empty, cold. Cytherea, with her disdainful gaze, evaded his wavering
+reach.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+Fanny, where the Groves were concerned, was utterly opposed to the
+plan which, Lee gathered, Claire had half supported. "It's really too
+foolish," his wife told him; "what can Mrs. Grove and you have to say
+to each other? And you won't get anywhere with Mina Raff. Indeed, Lee, I
+think it isn't quite dignified of you."
+
+"That won't bother me," he replied indulgently. "I was wondering--you
+haven't been away for so long--if you'd come with me. This other affair
+wouldn't take half a day: you could buy clothes and there are the
+theatres."
+
+"I'd love to." She hesitated. "When did you mean to go?" But, when
+he said the following noon, she discovered that that didn't allow her
+enough time for preparations. "You don't realize how much there is to do
+here, getting the servants and the children satisfactorily arranged. You
+might telephone me after you're there; and, if you didn't come back at
+once, perhaps I could manage it."
+
+Lee telegraphed Mrs. William Loyd Grove of his intention; and, with a
+table put up at his seat in the Pullman car for New York, he occupied
+himself opportunely with the reports of his varied profitable concerns.
+He had had a reply, sufficiently cordial, to his telegram, arranging for
+him to go directly to the Groves' house; but that he had declined; and
+when he gave the driver of a taxi-cab the address on East Sixty-sixth
+Street it was past four and the appropriate hour for afternoon tea.
+
+The house, non-committal on the outside--except for the perceived
+elaboration of the window draperies within--was, Lee saw at once, a
+rich undisturbed accumulation of the decorative traditions of the
+eighteen-eighties. The hall was dark, with a ceiling and elaborate
+panels of black walnut and a high dull silver paper. The reception room
+into which he was shown, by a maid, was jungle-like in its hangings and
+deep-tufted upholstery of maroon and royal blue velvets, its lace and
+twisted cords with heavy tassels, and hassocks crowded on the sombrely
+brilliant rugs sacred in mosques. There was a mantle in colored marbles,
+cabinets of fretted ebony, tables of onyx and floriated ormolu, ivories
+and ornaments of Benares brass and olivewood.
+
+In the close incongruity of this preserved Victorianism Mrs. William
+Loyd Grove, when she appeared soon after, startled Lee Randon by her
+complete expression of a severely modern air. She was dressed for the
+street in a very light brown suit, rigidly simple, with a small black
+three-cornered hat, a sable skin about her neck, and highly polished
+English brogues with gaiters. Mrs. Grove was thin--no, he corrected that
+impression, she was slight--her face, broad at the temples, narrowed
+gracefully to her chin; her eyes were a darker blue than the velvet;
+and her skin at once was evenly pale and had a suggestion of transparent
+warmth. The slender firm hand she extended, her bearing and the glimpse
+of a round throat, had lost none of the slender flexibility of youth.
+
+"The first thing I must do," she told him in an unsympathetic, almost
+harsh, voice, "is to say that I agree with you entirely about this
+house. It's beyond speech. But William won't have it touched. Probably
+you are not familiar with the stubborn traditions of old New Yorkers.
+Of course, when Mrs. Simeon Grove was alive, it was hopeless; but I
+did think, when she died, that something could be done. You can see how
+wrong I was--William can't be budged."
+
+She was, he silently continued his conclusions, past forty, but by not
+more than a year, or a year and a half. All that her signature suggested
+was true: she was more forcible, decisive, than he had expected. Money
+and place, with an individual authentic strength of personality, gave
+her voice its accent of finality, her words their abruptness, her manner
+an unending ease.
+
+"Mina said she might be here," Mrs. Grove went on, from an uncomfortable
+Jacobean chair, "if something or other happened at the studio. But I see
+she is not, and I am relieved."
+
+"Mrs. Morris regretted she couldn't come," Lee told her inanely; and his
+hostess replied:
+
+"I can't at all say that I believe you--I was so upset I couldn't resist
+the attempt. But I hope she understood that it was absolutely impossible
+for me to go to Eastlake."
+
+He nodded, a shade annoyed by the briskness of her attack.
+
+"We are immensely concerned about Mina," Mrs. Grove went on. "You
+see, with our son killed in the Lafayette Escadrille early in the war,
+practically she has been our only child. She is a daughter of a cousin
+of William's. Mina, I must admit, has become very difficult; I suppose
+because of her genius. She is perfectly amenable about everything in the
+world, until her mind gets set, like concrete, and then she is out of
+reach. Tell me a little about Mr. and Mrs. Morris."
+
+Lee Randon spoke sharply for a minute or two, and a frown gathered on
+his hearer's brow. "Why," she observed, "it is worse than I had hoped.
+But I should have guessed from the name--Peyton Morris. I am very sorry;
+you are fond of her, of Claire, that is evident."
+
+"I should not have come here for any other reason," he admitted. "I am
+not much of a meddler: it is so dangerous for everyone concerned. Then
+it might be that this was the best for all three of them."
+
+"What a curious, contradictory thing for you to say," she commented,
+studying him. "You mustn't let William hear that; he's far worse than I
+am."
+
+"I don't mean we can proceed from that attitude," Lee explained, "it was
+a sort of digression. I want to do whatever is possible to break it up;
+yes, purely for Claire."
+
+"I hope we may succeed." Her voice showed doubt. "William isn't always
+tactful, and I've told him again and again he's taking the wrong
+tone with Mina. What a pity the Morrises have turned out thoroughly
+nice--don't tell me your Claire didn't curse me, I know these girls--it
+is so much easier to deal with vulgar people. I can see now what it was
+in the young man that captured Mina, she'd like that type--the masculine
+with an air of fine linen." The tea-table was rolled up to them. "If you
+would rather have Scotch or rye it's here," she informed him. "But even
+the tea, you'll notice, is in a glass with rum; positively, soon no one
+will look at soup unless it's served as a highball."
+
+Lee Randon did prefer Scotch: none better, he discovered, was to be
+imagined; the ice was frozen into precisely the right size; and the
+cigars before him, a special Corona, the Shepheard's Hotel cigarettes,
+carried the luxury of comfort to its last perfection. Mrs. Grove smoked
+in an abstracted long-accustomed manner. "Well," she demanded, "what is
+there we can do?"
+
+"I rather trusted you to find that."
+
+"How can I? What hold have we on her? Mina is getting this nonsensical
+weekly sum; her contract runs for two years yet; and then it will
+be worse. Outrageous! I tell her she isn't worth it. And, now, this
+tiresome Morris has money, too; and you say he's as bad as Mina. Have
+you talked to her about Mrs. Morris? Mina is strangely sensitive, and,
+if you can find it, has a very tender heart."
+
+"I might do that over here," he suggested. "In Eastlake it wasn't
+possible. You've discouraged me, though; I suppose I had the idea that
+you could lock her up on bread and water."
+
+She laughed. "An army of Minnesota kitchen maids would break into the
+house; millions of people have voted Mina their favorite; when she is
+out with me the most odious crowds positively stop my car. I won't
+go with her any more where she can be recognized." Lee rose, and his
+expression showed his increasing sense of the uselessness of their
+efforts.
+
+"You mustn't give up," she said quickly; "you never can tell about Mina.
+You will come here for dinner, certainly; I'll send the car to your
+hotel at seven-thirty, and you will bring your bag. We can't argue over
+that, can we? William will enjoy having you very much. Do you mind my
+saying he'll be relieved? He is such a Knickerbocker. I needn't add, Mr.
+Randon, that you shall be entirely free: whenever you want to go
+down town Adamson will take you." The exact moulding of her body was
+insolent. "Well, then, for the moment--" She gave him no chance at
+refusal, but, with the curtness of her hand, the apparent vanishing of
+all knowledge of his presence, dismissed him before he was aware of it
+to the adroitness of the maid in the hall putting him into his overcoat.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+In a double room at his hotel, repacking the articles of toilet he had
+spread around the bathroom, Lee thought, but without heat, damn
+that Grove woman. He didn't want to go to the Grove house, it would
+complicate things with Fanny; and, if William did enjoy him, Lee Randon,
+would he enjoy William? It was questionable in the present state of his
+mind. Dinner, a servant at the Groves' informed him, would be at eight.
+His bag was swiftly and skillfully unpacked for him--this always annoyed
+Lee--and the water was turned into the tub. His room, richly draped
+and oppressive as the one downstairs, had a bed with a high carved oak
+headboard from which a heavy canopy, again of velvet and again crimson,
+reached to the floor at its foot; and by the side of the bed ran a long
+cushion over which he repeatedly stumbled.
+
+His immediate necessity was to telephone Fanny; she was delighted at the
+sound of his voice; but, when he told her what had happened, where he
+was, an increasing irritation crept into her voice. "I can't understand
+it at all," he heard her say, so clearly that it reconstructed her,
+expression and probable dress and setting, completely. "You asked me to
+come over and shop, and go to the theatre with you; and now that I have
+everything arranged, even Christopher pacified, you go to the Groves'.
+It seems to me most peculiar."
+
+He couldn't help it, he replied, with a slight responsive sharpening of
+his own speech; he had driven to the hotel, where he had secured their
+room, and Mrs. Grove had made it impossible for him to stay there.
+When he left--it would be late tomorrow or early the next day, Lee
+thought--she could meet him and do as they planned. But Fanny refused to
+agree: it would, now, be a needless expense. No, the other was what she
+had eagerly looked forward to. Lee, drawing her attention once more to
+the fact that it wasn't possible, was answered by so long a silence that
+he concluded she had hung up the receiver.
+
+"Have a good time," Fanny said at last; "you will, anyhow, with the Raff
+woman. I suppose Mrs. Grove, who seems to get everything she wants, is
+fascinating as well."
+
+"Indeed, I don't know, Fanny!" he exclaimed, his patience almost
+exhausted. "It hasn't occurred to me to think about her. I'm sorry you
+won't do what I suggest; it's not different from what we first thought
+of."
+
+"Good-bye," she answered reluctantly; "the children are here and send
+their love. They'd like to speak to you, but probably you're in a
+hurry."
+
+"I may be late for dinner now," he admitted.
+
+The receiver in his house was abruptly, unmistakably, replaced. No one
+else, and for so little perceptible cause, could make him as mad as
+Fanny frequently did. He put on his waistcoat, changed his money
+from the trousers on the bed to those he was wearing, in a formless
+indignation. This wasn't his fault, he repeated; positively, judged by
+her manner, he might be doing something wrong. Fanny even managed to
+convey a doubt of Mrs. Grove, Mrs. William Loyd Grove. But she couldn't
+see how ridiculous that was.
+
+William Grove Lee liked negatively; there was, patently, nothing in
+him to create an active response. His short heavy body was faultlessly
+clothed; his heavy face, with its moustache twisted into points, the
+clouded purple of his cheeks contradicted by the penetration of a
+steadily focussed gaze, expressed nothing more than a niceness of
+balance between self-indulgence, tempered by exercise, games in open
+air, and a far from negligible administration of the resources he had
+inherited.
+
+"You are a relative of the Morrises?" he asked Lee, turning from
+the menu set before him in a miniature silver frame. This Lee Randon
+admitted, and Grove's eyebrows mounted. "Can't anything be done with the
+young man?"
+
+"How are you succeeding with the young woman?" Lee returned.
+
+"Oh, women--" William Grove waved his hand; "you can't argue with women.
+Mina wants her Peyton--if that's his name; God knows I've heard it
+enough--and there's no more to that."
+
+"It begins to look as though she'd get him," Lee observed; "I must say
+we haven't got far with Morris."
+
+"Extraordinary."
+
+It was Mrs. Grove who spoke. She was dressed in grey, a gown cut away
+from sheer points on her shoulders, with a girdle of small gilt roses,
+her hair in a binding of grey brocade and amber ornaments; and above her
+elbows were bands of dull intricately pierced gold.
+
+"I wonder what it's all about?"
+
+Lee gazed at her with a new interest. "So do I," he acknowledged; "I was
+thinking of that, really, before this happened: what is it all about?"
+
+"I can answer that readily enough," Grove assured them; "anyone could
+with a little consideration. They saw too much of each other; they ran
+their heads into the noose. Trouble always follows. I don't care who
+they are, but if you throw two fairly young people of opposite sex
+together in circumstances any way out of the ordinary, you have a
+situation to meet. Mina has been spoiled by so much publicity; her
+emotions are constantly over-strung; and she thinks, if she wants it,
+that she can have the moon."
+
+"You believe that, I know, William," his wife commented; "I have often
+heard you say so. But what is your opinion, Mr. Randon--have you reached
+one and is a conclusion possible?"
+
+"I can't answer any of your questions," he admitted; "perhaps this is
+one of the things that must be experienced to be understood; certainly
+it hasn't a great deal to do with the mind." He turned to William Grove,
+"Your view has a lot to recommend it, even if it solves nothing. Suppose
+you are right--what then?"
+
+"I don't pretend to go that far," Grove protested; "I am not answering
+the questions of the universe. Savina has an idea there's a mystery in
+it, a quality hidden from reason; and I want to knock that on the
+head. It's a law of nature, that's all; keep away from it if you want
+security. I can't imagine people of breeding--you will have to overlook
+this, Mr. Randon, on the account of Morris--getting so far down the
+slide. It belongs to another class entirely, one without traditions or
+practical wisdom. Yet, I suppose it is the general tone of the day:
+they think they can handle fire with impunity, like children with parlor
+matches."
+
+"It can't, altogether, be accounted for so easily," Lee decided. "The
+whole affair has been so lied about, and juggled to suit different
+climates and people, that hardly any of the original impulse is left on
+view. What do you think would happen if for a while we'd lose our ideas
+of what was right and wrong in love?"
+
+"Pandemonium," Grove replied promptly.
+
+"Not if people were more responsible, William," Savina Grove added; "not
+for the superior. But then, all laws and order were made for the good of
+the mob. I don't need the policeman I see in the streets; and, really,
+I haven't a scrap more use for policeman-like regulations; I could
+regulate myself--"
+
+"And there," he interrupted, "is where Mina fails; she can't run herself
+for a damn; she ought to have a nurse. Your theories contradict each
+other, as well--you say one thing and do quite differently."
+
+She was silent at this, gazing at her hands, the beautifully made
+pointed fingers bare of rings. On their backs the veins, blue-violet,
+were visible; and there was a delicate tracery inside the bend of her
+arms. But her face, Lee reflected, was too passive, too inanimate; her
+lack of color was unvaried by any visible trace of emotion, life. She
+was, in fact, plain if not actually ugly; her mouth was too large; on
+the street, without the saving distinction of her dress, he wouldn't
+have noticed her.
+
+But what, above the rest, engaged him was her resemblance to someone
+he knew but couldn't recall. What woman, seen lately, had Mrs. Grove's
+still, intent face, her pointed chin and long throat? She lifted her
+hand, and the gesture, the suspended grace of the wrist, was familiar to
+him. Finally Lee Randon, unable to satisfy his curiosity, exasperated
+at the usual vain stupidity of such comparisons, gave up the effort.
+William Grove informed Lee that he might accompany him to his club,
+stay, or go as he willed. Mrs. Grove, it developed, would be at home,
+where, if he chose, they might pursue the cause of Lee Randon's presence
+there.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+There was, Lee soon grasped, very little that was useful to be said.
+They repeated what had been gone over before. Mrs. Grove explained again
+Mina Raff's unpredictable qualities, and he spoke of Peyton and Claire
+Morris. Beyond the admission of their surrender, Peyton's and hers, to
+each other, Mina had told the Groves nothing; Savina Grove was ignorant
+of what they intended. That it would begin at once was evident. "William
+is always a little annoyed by my contradictory character," she observed,
+gazing down at her slippers. They were grey, slight like a glove, on
+slight arched feet that held his attention. The conversation about
+the situation before them, expanded to its farthest limits, inevitably
+dragged; they said the same things, in hardly varied words, a third
+and even a fourth time; and then Lee's interest in it wholly deserted
+him--he could excite himself about Mina no longer.
+
+This left him confronted with himself and Mrs. Grove. A clock on the
+stairway struck ten. Her face hadn't a vestige of cordiality, and he
+wondered if she were fatigued, merely polite in remaining in the room
+with him? She needn't inconvenience herself on his account! It was
+pleasant enough at the Groves'; without doubt--in her own world--she was
+a woman of consequence, but he wasn't carried away by the privilege of
+studying her indifferent silences. Then she completely surprised him:
+
+"I suppose you have been to all the cafés and revues you ever want to
+see; but I almost never get to them; and it occurred to me that, if
+you didn't too much mind, we might go. What do you think--is it utterly
+foolish?"
+
+On the contrary, he assured her, it would amuse him immensely. Lee
+Randon said this so convincingly that she rose at once. To be with
+Mrs. William Loyd Grove at Malmaison--that, of all the places possible,
+presented itself at once--would furnish him with an uncommon evening.
+Consequently, driving smoothly over Fifth Avenue, a strange black river
+of solidified asphalt strung with fixed moons, in answer to her query,
+he proposed Malmaison, and the directions were transmitted into the
+ivory mouth-piece beside her. At the moment when the day was most
+threatened it had shown a new and most promising development. Over the
+grey dress Mrs. Grove wore a cloak with a subdued gold shimmer, her hat
+was hardly more than the spread wing of a bird across the pallor of
+her face, and the deep folds of the gloves on her wrists emphasized the
+slender charm of her arms. No young--younger woman, he decided, could
+compete with her in the worldly, the sophisticated, attractiveness she
+commanded: on the plane of absolute civilization she was supreme. In
+the semi-gloom of the closed car, sunken in her voluminous wrap of
+dull gold, with a high-bridged nose visible, a hand in its dead-white
+covering pressed into the cushion, she satisfied his every aesthetic
+requirement. Women, he reflected, should be primarily a show on a stage
+carefully set for the purpose of their loveliness. Not many men, and
+scarcely more women--so few were lovely--would agree with him there.
+Argument would confront him with the moral and natural beauty of
+maternity; very well, in such instincts, he thought with a resignation
+quite cheerful, he was lacking. Birth, self-oblivion, was no longer
+the end of his dream-like existence. Lee Randon wanted to find the
+justification, preserve the integrity, of his personality, and not lose
+it. Yes, if nature, as it seemed fully reasonable, had intended the
+other, something incalculable had upset its plans; for what now stirred
+Lee had nothing to do with breeding. Long-continued thought, instead
+of making his questioning clearer, endlessly complicated it. There was
+always a possibility, which he was willing to consider, that he was
+lacking in sheer normality; and that, therefore, his doubts, no more
+than neurasthenic, were without any value.
+
+He was ready to face this, but unable, finally, to accept it, to dismiss
+himself so cheaply. Whatever it was, troubling his imagination, was too
+perceptible at the hearts of other men. It wasn't new, singular, in him;
+nor had he borrowed it from any book or philosophy: it had so happened
+that he had never read a paragraph, satisfactory to him in the
+slightest, about the emotional sum of a man and a woman. What he read he
+couldn't believe; it was a paste of moralistic lies; either that or the
+writer had no greater power of explication than he. But, while he might
+deny a fundamental irregularity, the majority of men, secretly delivered
+to one thing, would preach virtuously at him the other. He recalled
+how universal were the traces of dissatisfaction he had noticed; an
+uneasiness of the masculine world that resembled a harborful of ships
+which, lying long and placidly at anchor, began in a rising wind to stir
+and pull at their hawser chains.
+
+Lee didn't mean that this restlessness was confined to men; simply he
+was intent on his own problem. The automobile turned into a cross-town
+street; they met, entered, a mass of cars held at Broadway, advanced a
+few feet, stopped, went on, and, twisting through the traffic, reached
+Malmaison. He left his outer things at the door, but Mrs. Grove kept her
+cloak, and they mounted in an elevator to the café floor. The place was
+crowded with brightly filled tables surrounding the rectangular open
+dancing space, and Lee signalled for a captain. That experienced
+individual, with a covert glance at Lee Randon's companion, a hand
+folded about a sum of money that would have paid the butcher for a week
+at Eastlake, found, however, exactly what they wanted; and Mrs. Grove's
+dominating slimness emerged by degrees, like a rare flower from leaves
+of quiet gold.
+
+They sat facing each other. At a table on Lee's left, on a floor a
+foot higher, sat a woman, Spanish in color, with a face like a crumpled
+petunia. The girls of a larger party, beyond Savina Grove, were young,
+with the vigorous nakedness of their shoulders and backs traced by black
+cobwebs of lace. The music began, and they left to dance; the deserted
+tables bore their drinks undisturbed while the floor was choked by
+slowly revolving figures distilling from the rhythm frank gratification.
+There was an honesty of intention, the admission that life and nights
+were short, lacking in the fever at the Eastlake dancing; here, rather
+than unsettled restraint, was the determination to spend every excited
+nerve on sensation, to obtain the last drop from glasses the contents
+and odors of which uniquely resembled the drinks of pre-prohibition.
+These girls, consciously animating their shapely bodies with the
+allurement if not the ends of creation, prostitutes of both temperament
+and fact, were, Lee Randon decided, calmer--yes, safer--in mind and
+purpose than were his most admirable friends.
+
+Certainly they were better defined, more logically placed than, for
+example, Mrs. William Loyd Grove--her dress, her powdering and perfume,
+the warm metal clasped about the softness of her arms, and the indicated
+purpose about them, were not worlds apart. But the latter met its
+announced intention; it was dissipated--normally--in satiety. But, where
+Mrs. Grove was concerned ... Lee speculated. She was evidently highly
+engaged, not a shade repelled, by what she saw; in a cool manner she
+drew his gaze to a specially scarlet and effective dress:
+
+"With her figure it's very successful," she commented.
+
+What struck him immediately was that the proportions she had pointed out
+and her own were identical; and Lee had a vision of Mrs. Grove in the
+dress they were studying. The same thing, it appeared, was in her
+mind. "Well," she challenged him, "I could, you know." This he admitted
+discreetly, and asked her if she cared to dance.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+In his arms she was at once light and perceivable; everything a part of
+her was exquisitely finished; he discovered more and more surely that
+she was flesh and blood, and not, as he had regarded her, an insulated
+social mechanism. Leaving the dancing floor, she was careless, in the
+manner everywhere evident, in the disposition of her skirt. Lee had come
+prepared for the pleasure to be had from on-looking; but he had become
+the most oblivious of all the active participants. After a second brief
+understanding with the captain, another quickly-disposed currency note,
+there was the familiar smothered uncorking of champagne by his ear. To
+Lee Randon's lavishness Mrs. Grove gave no attention, and he was obliged
+to banish a petty chagrin by the knowledge that he had fully met the
+obligations of her presence. The propping of her elbows on the table,
+her casual gazing over the lifted rim of her glass, her silences, all
+admitted him to her own unremarked, her exclusive and inalienable,
+privilege.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+She still, however, retained her personal remoteness from him; what
+she gave belonged to him, in their situation, conventionally; it had no
+greater significance; and, forming nearly all of the duty of life,
+her life, she discharged her responsibility beautifully. She wasn't,
+certainly, gay in the sense most familiar to him--Anette, in the same
+circumstances, would have radiated a bubbling sensual pleasure, indulged
+in a surface impropriety; any girl around them would have given more
+than Mrs. Grove; everything, probably. But he preferred the penetrating
+judgments, the superior mental freedom, of his companion. If she
+were interested in a prostitute, she didn't, with a laborious
+self-consciousness, avoid that term; she was neither obviously aware of
+those fragile vessels of pleasure nor ignorant of them; indeed, Lee told
+himself, she was more a part of their world, however continent she might
+remain, than she was of Fanny's.
+
+Fanny, here, would have been equally fascinated and shocked; but,
+essentially, she'd be hurt; and, at the same time, rebellious with the
+innate resentment of the pure, the contained, for the free. She would
+never have agreed to the champagne, either; they would have ordered
+lemonades or claret cup; and, by midnight, gone back to the hotel. It
+was now past two o'clock. There was no lessening in the vigor of the
+dancing, the laughter, or in the stream of laden trays; no trace of
+fatigue in Mrs. Grove. She had the determined resilience of a woman
+approaching, perhaps, the decline, but not yet in it; of one who had
+danced into innumerable sun-rises from the night before, destroying many
+dozens of pairs of satin slippers.
+
+When it occurred to her to gather up the petal-like folds of her cloak,
+get her hands into the gloves rolled back on her wrists, it was nearer
+three than two. A hollow voice on the street called the number of the
+Grove automobile, the door closed smoothly on them, and again she was
+absorbed into the cushions and her wrap. But there was a change in his
+feeling for her, an indefinable but potent boundary had been crossed:
+they had looked together, informally, at life, at passion, and the
+resulting sympathy had, finally, put aside the merely casual. Lee
+lighted a cigarette, and, without speech, she took it from him,
+transferred it to her own lips.
+
+Eastlake and Fanny, Helena and Gregory, seemed very remote; a quality of
+his being suppressed at home here possessed him completely: in a black
+silk evening waistcoat, with no responsibilities, no thought of time
+or work, he was, lightly and wholly, an idler in a polite sphere. The
+orchids in their glass holder, dimly visible before him, were a
+symbol of his purely decorative engagement with life. Now Lee couldn't
+reconcile himself to the knowledge that this was no more than an
+interlude--with music--in his other, married existence. It was as
+unsubstantial as an evening's performance, in temporary finery, of a
+high comedy of manners.
+
+Savina Grove said, "It has been surprisingly nice."
+
+"Hasn't it," he agreed; "and, when you spoke, I was trying to realize
+that it will be so soon over."
+
+Immediately after he cursed himself for a blunder, a stupid error in
+emphasis, from which she drew perceptibly away. She extinguished the
+cigarette, his cigarette, and that, as well, added to the distance
+between them.
+
+"I should go back to Eastlake tomorrow afternoon," he observed, in a
+manner which he made entirely detached. To that she objected that he
+would not see Mina Raff, nothing would be accomplished. "She might have
+dinner with you tomorrow night," she thought; "Mina gets back to the
+Plaza a little before seven. But we can call the studio."
+
+In view of what he had already done, Mrs. Grove's proposal seemed
+unavoidably reasonable. He would telephone Fanny again in the morning
+and explain. Fanny, his wife! Well, he continued, as though he were
+angrily retorting to a criticism from without, no man ever better
+realized the splendid qualities of his wife. That was beyond
+contradiction; and he sharply added that not Fanny, but the role of a
+wife, a housewife, was under observation. Mrs. Grove was married, but
+that didn't keep her from the Malmaison, at what Eastlake disapprovingly
+called all hours of the night. She had no aspect of a servitude which,
+while it promised the most unlimited future rewards, took the present
+grace, the charm, from women. That--the consequent loss or gain--was
+open to question; but the fact remained: for the majority of women
+marriage was fatal to their persons. Only the rich, the fortunate and
+the unamenable escaped.
+
+"In a very few minutes now," Mrs. Grove said, "you will be able to
+sleep."
+
+"I've never been wider awake," he protested; "I was thinking of how
+marriage submerged most women while you escaped."
+
+She laughed quietly, incomprehensibly.
+
+"Well," he insisted, aggrieved, "haven't you?"
+
+She leaned toward him; almost, he told himself, there was a flash of
+animation on her immobile face. "Escape, what do you mean by that?" she
+demanded. "Does anyone escape--will young Morris and Mina? And you?"
+
+"Oh, not I," he replied, thrown off his mental balance by the rapid
+attack of her questioning; "I am tied in a thousand ways. But you
+surprise me."
+
+"I could," she remarked, coldly, returning to her corner. "Your
+self-satisfaction makes me rage, How do you dare, knowing nothing, to
+decide what I am and what I can do? You're like William, everyone I
+meet--so sure for others."
+
+"No, I'm not," he contradicted her with a rude energy; "and, after
+all, I didn't accuse you of much that was serious. I only said you were
+apparently above the circumstances that spoil so many women."
+
+"It isn't necessary to repeat yourself," she reminded him disagreeably;
+"I have a trace of memory."
+
+"And with it," he answered, "a very unpleasant temper."
+
+"Quite so," she agreed, once more calm; "you seem fated to tell me about
+myself. I don't mind, and it gives you such a feeling of wisdom." The
+car stopped before the Grove house and, within, her good-night was
+indifferent even for her. What, he wondered, what the devil, had upset
+her? He had never encountered a more incomprehensible display of the
+arrogantly feminine.
+
+In his room, however, re-establishing his sense of comfort, he found, on
+a low table by the bed, a choice of whiskies, charged water, cigarettes,
+nectarines, orange-brown mangoes, and black Belgian grapes, Attached
+to an electric plug was a small coffee percolator; for the morning, Lee
+gathered. His pajamas, his dressing gown and slippers, were conveniently
+laid at his hand. He was, in fact, so comfortable that he had no desire
+to get into bed; and he sat smoking, over a tall drink, speculating
+about his hostess. Perhaps she had difficulties with the obdurate
+correctness of William; but Mrs. Grove would have been too well-steeled
+there to show any resentment to a virtual stranger; no, whatever it was
+lay within herself. He gave it up, since, he proclaimed aloud, it didn't
+touch him.
+
+The opened windows admitted the vast unsubdued clamor of New York; the
+immeasurable force of the city seemed to press in upon the room, upon
+his thoughts. How different it was from the open countryside, the quiet
+scene, of his home in Eastlake. There the lowing of a chance cow robbed
+of her calf, her udder aching, the diminishing barking of dogs and the
+birds--sparrows in winter and robins in the spring--were the only sounds
+that disturbed the dark. In the morning the farmer above Lee rolled the
+milk down the road, past his window, on a carrier, and the milk cans
+made a sudden rattle and ringing. Then Christopher washed the porches.
+Fanny, no matter how late she had been up the night before, was dressed
+by eight o'clock, and put fresh flowers in the vase. He hazarded the
+guess that Mrs. Grove was often in bed until past noon; here servants
+renewed the great hot-house roses with long stems, the elaborate flowers
+on the dining-table.
+
+In the morning, as he had foreseen, the percolator was connected, cream
+and sugar placed beside it; and before his shaving was over, he had a
+cup of coffee with a cigarette casting up its fragrant smoke from the
+saucer. His shoes might have been lacquered from the heighth of the
+lustre rubbed into them; a voice the perfection of trained sympathetic
+concern inquired for the exacted details of the suspended preparation of
+his eggs.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+His dinner engagement with Mina Raff, arranged through her secretary,
+was for fifteen minutes past seven; and, meanwhile, as Mrs. Grove had
+offered, Adamson drove Lee down-town. The afternoon had nearly gone
+before he returned to East Sixty-sixth Street; but the maid at the door
+told him that there was tea up in the library. This he found to be
+a long gloomy room finished in a style which, he decided, might be
+massively Babylonian. A ponderous table for the support of weightless
+trifles filled the middle of the rug; there were deep chairs of roan
+leather, with an immense sofa like the lounge of a club or steamer; low
+bookcases with leaded glass; and windows the upper panes of which were
+stained in peacock colors and geometrical design.
+
+The tea things were on a wagon beside the center table; there were
+a number of used cups and crumpled napkins, and whiskey glasses, in
+evidence, but Mrs. Grove was alone. She had been about to have them
+removed, she told him, when he rang. "No, I am not in a hurry; and it's
+such a disagreeable day you ought to have a highball."
+
+She was in black, a dress that he found unbecoming, with a collar high
+about her throat and wide sleeves heavily embroidered in carmine. "You
+will hate that one," she said of the chair he selected; "I can't think
+why chairs have to be so very uncomfortable--these either swallow you
+whole or, like a toboggan slide, drop you on the floor." Lee drew up a
+tabourette for his glass and ash tray. The banal idea struck him that,
+although he had met Mrs. Grove only yesterday, he knew her well; rather
+he had a sense of ease, of the familiar, with her. The sole evidence
+she gave of an agreement in his feeling was that she almost totally
+neglected to talk. She smoked, absorbed in a frowning abstraction. A
+floor lamp behind them was lighted, and there was an illumination at
+the mantel, but the depths of the library were wrapped in obscurity: its
+sombreness had increased, the air was heavy with the dust of leather, a
+vague funereal oppressiveness.
+
+Lee's sense of familiarity increased, but his ease left him, driven
+away by the strength of a feeling not exactly of being at home but of
+returning to an old powerful influence. Mrs. Grove's head was in shadow.
+There was a stir at the door, and William Grove entered. He was, he told
+Lee civilly, glad that Adamson had been of use. "I walk whenever it's
+possible," he proceeded; "but that way you wouldn't have reached Beaver
+Street yet. Nothing to drink, thanks, Savina, but a cigarette--" Lee
+Randon reached forward with the silver box and, inadvertently, he
+pressed into Mrs. Grove's knee. He heard a thin clatter, there was a
+minute hot splash on his hand, and he realized that she had dropped her
+spoon. She sat rigidly, half turned toward the light, with a face that
+shocked him: it was not merely pale, but white, drawn and harsh, and her
+eyes, losing every vestige of ordinary expression, stared at him in a
+set black intensity.
+
+"I'm sorry," Lee Randon said mechanically, and he offered the cigarette
+box to the other man; but, internally, he was consumed with anger.
+The woman positively was a fool to mistake his awkwardness; he hadn't
+supposed that anyone could be so super-sensitive and suspicious; and it
+damaged his pride that, clearly, she should consider him capable of such
+a juvenile proceeding. Lee rose and excused himself stiffly, explaining
+that it was time for him to dress; and, in his room, telephoning Fanny,
+he determined to leave New York, the Groves, as early as possible in the
+morning.
+
+Fanny responded from Eastlake in a tone of unending patience; nothing he
+could do, her voice intimated, would exhaust her first consideration of
+him; she wouldn't--how could she?--question the wisdom of his decisions,
+even when they seemed, but, of course, only to her faulty understanding,
+incomprehensible.
+
+"You make it sound as though I were over here on an errand of my own,"
+he protested cheerfully; "I'd rather be in Eastlake."
+
+Helena, she told him, had been bad again; there was a recognized
+opinion between them that, while Gregory was like his mother, Helena
+surprisingly resembled Lee Randon. "Well, don't be too severe," he
+said. Someone had to be, the reply came, faint and indistinct. "Is there
+anything else?" he asked. Of course, how stupid, she was keeping him;
+the sound was now open and colored with self-reproach. She was so sorry.
+"Damn!" Lee exclaimed, leaving the telephone with the feeling that Fanny
+had repelled his affection. Women were beyond him.
+
+In this mood he was unprepared for the appearance of Mina Raff,
+immediately after his name was sent up to her rooms, on the minute
+arranged. What, next, about her occurred to him was the evidence of her
+weariness. A short and extremely romantic veil hung from the close
+brim of her hat--with her head bent forward she gazed at him seriously
+through the ornamental filaments; her chin raised, the intent regard of
+her celebrated eyes was unhampered. She didn't care where they went, she
+replied to his question, except that she preferred a quiet place, where
+they could talk.
+
+The St. Regis, he thought, would best answer this requirement; and he
+had started toward the taxi-cab stand when she informed him that she had
+kept her car. It was larger and more elaborately fitted than the Grove
+limousine; in its deep upholstery, its silk curtains and velvet carpet
+and gold mounted vanities, Mina Raff was remarkably child-like, small;
+her face, brightening at intervals in the rapidly passing lights
+outside, was touched by pathos; she seemed crushed by the size, the
+swiftness and complexity, of her automobile, and by the gathering
+imperious weight of her fame. She was still, however, appealingly
+simple; no matter what she might do it would be invested with the aspect
+of innocence which, admirable for her art, never for an instant deserted
+her personality.
+
+Lee Randon, who liked her better with each accumulating minute, wondered
+why he was completely outside the disturbance of her charm. As a young
+man, he concluded, he would have been lost in a passionate devotion
+to her. Mina realized to the last possible indefinite grace the ideal,
+always a silver abstraction, of youth; the old worn simile of an April
+moon, distinguished in her case by the qualification, wistful, was
+the most complete description of her he possessed. Young men--Peyton
+Morris--were worshippers of the moon, the unattainable; and when they
+happily attained a reality they hid it in iridescent fancy.
+
+What now formed Lee's vision had, together with no less a mystery, a
+greater warmth and implied reality from him. Cytherea and Mina Raff
+shared nothing; somehow the latter lacked the magnetism essential to the
+stirring of his desire. This, perhaps, was inevitable to his age, to the
+swift passage of that young idealism: after forty, the nebulous became a
+need for sensuous reality. Certain phases of Mina, as well, were
+utterly those of a child--she had the eluding sweetness, the flower-like
+indifference, of Helena, of a temperamental virginity so absolute that
+it was incapable of understanding or communicating an emotional
+fever. But, in the degree of her genius, she was above, superior to,
+experience; it was not, for her, necessary; she was not changed by
+it, but changed it into herself, into the validity of whatever she
+intrinsically was.
+
+His thoughts returned to the unfortunate occurrence in the library at
+the Groves'; his indignation at Mrs. Grove was complicated, puzzled, by
+the whole loss of the detached self-possession which, he had thought,
+was her most persistent characteristic. Her expression, in memory,
+specially baffled him; under other, accountable, circumstances he should
+have said that it was a look of suffering, of drawn pain. He couldn't
+recall the appearance of a shade of anger; yet the spoon had fallen
+as if from a hand numb with--with resentment. No other deduction was
+possible. He wished it were permissible to speak to her again about
+what--but obviously--had been no more than an accident; he objected to
+leaving such a ridiculous misconception of himself lodged permanently in
+her mind. But he couldn't bring it up again; and, after all, it mattered
+very little. Mrs. Grove was welcome to whatever flattering of her
+seductiveness her pride demanded. When he had dispatched, with Mina
+Raff, his duty to Claire, succeeded or failed--the latter, he added, was
+of course inevitable--he'd return to Eastlake and the Groves would go
+out of his life.
+
+The curtain of what he had thought of as a play, an interlude, would
+fall heavily, conclusively, and the music end.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+At the St. Regis he chose the more informal dining-room with panellings
+and high columns of wood, and medallions in white marble. It was neither
+full nor empty, and they were conducted to a table set for two. Lee was
+conscious of heads turning, and of a faint running whisper--Mina Raff
+had been recognized. However, without any exhibited consciousness of
+this, she addressed herself to him with a pretty exclusion; and,
+pausing to explain her indifference to food, she left the selection of
+everything but the salad to Lee; she had, she admitted, a preference
+for alligator pears cut into small cubes with a French dressing. That
+disposed of, he turned to her:
+
+"I noticed, at the Plaza, that you are hard at it."
+
+"Indeed, yes," she replied; "but we are still only rehearsing; not a
+scene has been shot. You see, that makes it all so expensive; I want to
+do as well as possible for the men who have money and confidence in me."
+
+This, from her manner, her deceptive look of fragility everywhere
+drooping with regret, was patent. What she said, thought, felt, was
+magnificently reflected, given visibility, by her fluid being. "But you
+haven't come over here to talk to me about that," she said directly;
+"you want me to give up Peyton."
+
+He nodded, relieved that she had made the introduction of his purpose so
+easy.
+
+"I ought to tell you, before we begin," she warned him, "that I can't.
+Nothing can convince me that we are wrong. We didn't try to have this
+happen, we did all we could--but it was too late--to prevent it," Mina
+Raff repeated Peyton's own assurance to him. "Things were taken out
+of our hands. Why I went to Eastlake I don't know, it was dreadfully
+inconvenient, and my director did what he could to keep me working.
+But, as you know, I persisted. Why?" She stopped and regarded him
+imploringly, through the romantic veil. "I haven't the smallest idea,"
+she continued. "Peyton had seen me again in New York; I knew then that
+I meant a lot to him; but it couldn't have happened if I hadn't stayed
+with Anette."
+
+Her voice, her wonderment, he thought, were colored by superstition.
+Evidently, up to a certain point, she had resisted, and then--how
+charming it must have been for Morris--she collapsed. She had convinced
+herself that they were intended for each other. Lee asked, "How well do
+you know Peyton?"
+
+"Not at all in the way you do," she admitted candidly; "I understand him
+only with my heart. But isn't that everything? I know that he is very
+pure, and doesn't ordinarily care for women--usually I have no feeling
+about men--and that he played football at Princeton and is very strong.
+You have no idea, Mr. Randon, how different he is from the men I am
+thrown with! There are some actors, of course, who are very fine,
+wonderful to work with; but the ones not quite so finished.... It's
+natural, for many reasons, in a woman to act; but there is something,
+well--something, about men acting, as a rule; don't you agree?"
+
+Lee did, and told her so with a growing pleasure in the rightness of her
+perceptions. "Peyton is altogether different from the men of the stage,"
+he developed her observation; "and it is a capital thing he did play
+football; for, in the next year or so, until he grows used to your
+life, he'll have a collection of men to knock down. I'd like to tell you
+whatever I have discovered about him, for your own consideration, and
+Peyton is a snob. That isn't necessarily a term of contempt; with him
+it simply means that he is impatient, doubtful, at what he doesn't know.
+And first under that head come the arts; they have no existence for him
+or his friends. A play or a book pleases him or it doesn't, he approves
+of its limiting conventional morals, or violently condemns what he
+thinks is looseness, and that's the extent of his interest."
+
+Mina Raff gazed at him blankly, this time from under the scallops of
+the veil. "That is hard to believe," she objected; "he talks to me
+beautifully about my pictures and a future on the stage. He says that I
+am going to revolutionize moving pictures--"
+
+"I don't question that," he put in; "but did Peyton show you how it
+would be done?"
+
+She hesitated, gracefully lowering her potent gaze.
+
+"Probably," Lee Randon added keenly, "it was to happen because you were
+so excessively beautiful." There was no reply to this. "I don't need
+to tell you," he admitted, "that I did my best to discourage him; and
+I pointed out that the time must come when you would fancy, no, need,
+someone else."
+
+"Oh, that was cruel!" she cried softly; "and it isn't, it won't be true.
+Do you think, just because I happen to be an actress, that I can't be
+faithful?"
+
+"It is all a question of degree," he instructed her, "of talent or
+genius. Talent may be faithful to a number of things--a man or a country
+or even an ideal; but the only fidelity of genius is to itself."
+
+"I hadn't thought of that," she reflected, sadly.
+
+"Why should you?" he demanded; "you are being natural; I am the
+disturbance, the conventional voice sentimentally reading from the
+call book. But you don't have those in moving pictures: it would be a
+sentimentally stupid director. You must believe me: your acting will
+always be incomprehensible to Peyton: he will approve of the results
+and raise hell--for the comparatively short time he will last--with the
+means. Tell me this: together with his conviction that you'd carry the
+stage up into heaven, didn't he speak of your retiring?"
+
+The faint smile about her lips was a sufficient answer. That smile, he
+recognized, pensive and unlingering, served a wide and practical variety
+of purposes. "In the end," he insisted, "Peyton will want to take you to
+a home in a correct suburb; that conception he'll never get away from."
+She answered:
+
+"And what if I liked that, wanted it? You mustn't think my life is
+entirely joyful."
+
+"I don't," he as promptly assured her; "but you will never get away
+from it; you will never sit contentedly through long afternoons playing
+bridge; you're cursed, if you want to call it that."
+
+"I saw Peyton's child," she said at a tangent. "He had hold of the
+nurse's apron in such a funny decided fist. I wanted to hug him, but
+I remembered that it wasn't the thing to do. She has that," a shade of
+defiance darkened her voice at her reference to Claire.
+
+"Babies are no longer overwhelmingly important," Lee retorted; "not
+in the face of emotion itself; they have become a sort of unavoidable,
+almost an undesirable by-product."
+
+"They won't be with me," Mina Raff promised.
+
+It was evident to him that she saw herself in the role of a mother; her
+face had a tender maternal glamour, her eyes were misted with sentiment;
+a superb actress. "A baby of my own," she whispered; "a baby and a house
+and Peyton."
+
+"Nothing duller could be imagined." Momentarily he lost his
+self-restraint. "You have something inimitable, supremely valuable, and
+you are dreaming like a rabbit. If you must be a mother, be that one on
+the screen, for the thrilling of millions of limited minds."
+
+"He seemed to like me." She had paid no attention to him, back again in
+the thought of the Morrises' son.
+
+"If he did," Lee dryly added; "he will very soon get over it; Ira won't
+love you conspicuously."
+
+"Why--why that never entered my head," Mina was startled; "but, yes, how
+could he? And I can't bear to have anyone, the most insignificant person
+alive, hate me. It makes me too wretched to sleep. They will have to
+understand, be generous; I'll explain so it is entirely clear to them."
+Her voice bore an actual note of fear, her delicate lips trembled
+uncontrollably.
+
+"You can't blame them, Ira and his mother, if they refuse to listen.
+Eastlake as a town will dispense with you; and Claire's family--it
+is really quite notable--will have their say wherever they live, in
+Charleston and London and Spain. When Ira is grown up and, in his turn,
+has children, they will be very bitter about your memory. However,
+publicly, I suppose it will do you more good than harm. The public loves
+such scandal; but, with that advertisement, the other will continue. It
+isn't logical, I'll admit; except for Claire I should support you. That
+is where, and only where, I am dragged into your privacy. And, too, for
+your sake, it would have been better if you had hit on a different sort
+of man, one without the background of such stubborn traditions. You
+will have to fight them both in him--where they, too, may come to blame
+you--and about you. There is a strain of narrow intolerance through all
+that blood."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Mina Raff's eyes fluttered like two clear brown butterflies which,
+preparing to settle, had been rudely disturbed. Then her mouth was
+compressed, it grew firm and firmer, obdurate; as though an internal
+struggle, evident in her tense immobility, had been decided against
+what was being powerfully urged upon her. A conviction that here, too,
+finally, he had failed, was in possession of Lee Randon, when he saw the
+determination drain from her face: it assumed a child's expression of
+unreasoning primitive dread. She drew a hand across her forehead.
+
+"I shall have to think," she told him; "I am very much upset. It makes
+me cold, what you said. Why did you come to New York and talk to me like
+this? Oh, I wish Peyton were here; he'd answer you; he isn't a coward
+like me."
+
+"Since you are so tired, and I've been so very objectionable, I think
+perhaps you had better go back to your hotel," Lee proposed. "It's
+after ten." She rose immediately, but had to remain until the waiter was
+summoned with their account. In her limousine she seemed smaller, more
+lost in her fate and money, than before. She resembled a crushed and
+lovely flower; and Lee reflected that it was a shame no one was there
+to revive her. Mina Raff, at the Plaza, insisted, holding his hand in
+a mingled thoughtfulness and pictorial misery, on sending him to the
+Groves'; and his last glimpse of her, over his shoulder, was of a slight
+figure hurled into upper expensive mansions by an express elevator.
+
+A car not the Groves' was outside their house; and, as Lee was passing
+the drawing-room doors, William Grove called him in. He found there a
+Dr. Davencott and his wife, obviously on terms of close intimacy with
+the house. The physician was a thickly-built man with an abrupt manner
+continually employed in sallies of a vigorous but not unkindly humor.
+Lee gathered that his practice was large and select; and he quickly
+saw the reason, the explanation, of this: Dr. Davencott had carried the
+tonic impatience of earlier years among inconsequential people into a
+sphere where bullying was a novelty with a direct traceable salutary
+effect. But whatever harshness was visible in him was tempered by his
+wife, who was New England, Boston itself, at its best. She had a grave
+charm, a wit, rather than humor, which irradiated her seriousness, and
+gave even her tentative remarks an air of valuable finality.
+
+To this Mrs. Grove contributed little. She practically avoided speaking
+to Lee Randon; and he was certain that she was, cheaply and inexcusably,
+offended at him. Then, in moving, her gaze caught his, their eyes held
+fixed; and, as he looked, the expression he had seen on her face that
+afternoon in the library, drawn and white with staring black eyes, came
+upon her. It amazed him so much that he, too, sat regarding her in an
+intentness which took no account of the others. One of Mrs. Grove's
+hands, half hidden in green tulle, was clenched. She breathed in an
+audible sigh and, with what appeared to be a wrenching effort, turned
+from him to the general conversation.
+
+Lee Randon, losing his first impression of her attitude, was totally
+unable to comprehend the more difficult state that had its place.
+A possible explanation he dismissed before it had crystallized into
+thought. At the same time, the restlessness which had left him for the
+past twenty-four hours returned, more insistent than ever. He felt that
+it would be impossible to remain seated, calmly talking, for another
+minute. The conversation of the Davencotts that had so engaged him now
+only sounded like a senseless clatter of words and unendurable laughter.
+He wished they would go; that all of them except Savina Grove would
+vanish; but why he wanted her to stay, why he wished to be alone with
+her, and what, in such a circumstance, he would say, were all mysteries.
+Lee determined to rise and make his bow, to escape; he was aware of
+an indefinable oppression, like that he had often experienced during
+a heavy electric storm; he had the absurd illusion that a bolt of
+lightning.... Lee Randon didn't stir: he sat listening with a set smile,
+automatic small speech, and a heart with an unsteady rising pound.
+
+The Doctor's stories, he thought, went on unsupportably; his wife was
+wise, correct, just, to a hair's breadth. Good God, when would they
+go? Now--there was a break in the conversation--he would rise and say
+good-night. Probably they wanted to discuss things more personal than
+his presence allowed and were waiting for just that. He was aware that
+Mrs. Grove's gaze, as though against her resolute effort, was moving
+toward him; but, quite desperately, he avoided it; he gazed up at a
+chandelier of glittering and coruscating glass and down at a smooth
+carpet with Chinese ideographs on a light background. He heard the
+flexible vibration of the pleasure traffic on Fifth Avenue; and, perhaps
+because it was so different, it reminded him of the ringing milk cans in
+the early morning by his house.
+
+Lee Randon made a sharp effort to rouse himself from what threatened to
+be a stupor faintly lurid with conceptions of insanity; and the result
+of this mental drawing himself erect was even more startling, more
+disconcerting, than his previous condition. It came from the realization
+that what animated Mrs. Grove was passion. This was incredible, but it
+was true; he had never before seen, nor imagined, such an instant
+sultry storm of emotions held precariously in check. Beyond measure it
+surprised and baffled and agitated him. He understood now that sense
+of impending lightning; and, at the same time, he had a sense that
+a peremptory brass gong had been struck beside him, and that he was
+deafened by the reverberations. Mrs. Grove's still pallid face, her
+contained, almost precise, manner, took on a new meaning--he saw them,
+fantastically, as a volcanic crust that, under observation, had hardened
+against the fire within. Then he was at a loss to grasp why he, Lee
+Randon, was permitted to see so much.
+
+His thoughts returned to himself--the voices of the Davencotts, of
+William Loyd Grove, echoed from a distance on his hearing--and he tried
+to re-arrange his bearing toward his unsought discovery: this was of
+enormous importance. He must at once regulate his approach to Mrs.
+Grove, get himself firmly in hand; the situation, for him particularly,
+had far-reaching unpredictable possibilities. For all her exactness,
+Savina Grove had a very exclusive and definite attractiveness; and,
+faced by such a dilemma, Lee had the best of reasons for doubting the
+ultimate regularity of his response.
+
+But he was, he thought, mentally halting, racing absurdly to unjustified
+conclusions; nothing, naturally, disturbing would arise; but that
+assurance, the heights of reason, soon faded. There could be no doubt of
+the cause of Mrs. Grove's blanched staring: just as there was no evasion
+of the danger created by no more than his scant recognition. Passion
+discovered was a thousand diameters increased; mutually admitted, it
+swept aside all opposition. Lee Randon, however, had no intention of
+involving himself there while, ironically, he was engaged in securing
+for Claire Morris her husband; he didn't propose to compromise his ease
+of mind with William Grove's wife. There was, as well, the chance that
+she was a little unbalanced; progressing, he might involve himself in
+a regrettable, a tragic, fix. He would not progress, that was all there
+was to that! Lee felt better, freer already, at this resolution; he
+wasn't, he protested inwardly, a seducer of women; the end itself, the
+consummation, of seduction, was without tyrannical power over him. Lee
+wasn't materially, patiently, sensual in that uncomplicated manner. No,
+his restlessness was more mysterious, situated deeper, than that; it
+wasn't so readily satisfied, drugged, dismissed. The fact struck him
+that it had little or no animal urgency; and in this, it might be, he
+was less lucky than unlucky.
+
+Mrs. Davencott rose and resumed her wrap, retained with her on the back
+of the chair. Lee met the pleasant decisiveness of her capable hand, the
+doctor grasped his fingers with a robust witticism; and he was replying
+to the Davencotts' geniality when he had a glimpse of Mrs. Grove's face
+turned slightly from him: the curve of her cheek met the pointed chin
+and the graceful contour of her exposed long throat; there was the
+shadow of a tormenting smile on the pale vermilion of her lips, in her
+half closed eyes; her hair, in that light, was black. A sensation of
+coldness, a spiritual shiver, went through Lee Randon; the resemblance
+that had eluded him was mercilessly clear--it was to the doll, to
+Cytherea.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+When Dr. Davencott and his wife had gone Lee sank back into his chair,
+more disorganized by his culminating discovery than by any of the
+extraordinary conditions that had preceded it. Its quality of the
+unexpected, however, wasn't enough to account for the profound effect on
+him; that was buried in the secret of instinctive recognitions. "Well,
+the thing for me to do is to go to bed," he said aloud, but it was no
+more than an unconvinced mutter, addressed to the indeterminate region
+of his feet. Savina Grove was standing by the door, in the place,
+the position, in which she had said good-bye to the Davencotts. Her
+flamboyant tulle skirt, contrasted with the tightly-fitting upper part
+of her dress, gave her, now, in the sombre crowded furnishings, the rich
+draped brocades, of the room, an aspect of mid-Victorian unreality.
+
+"It is for me, as well," she agreed, but so long after he had spoken
+that the connection between their remarks was almost lost. However,
+neither of them made a movement to leave the drawing-room, Savina Grove
+returned slowly to her chair. "No one, I think, has ever found it out
+like that." Her remark was without intelligible preliminary, but he
+grasped her meaning at once. "How you happened to stir it in me I have
+no idea--" she stopped and looked at him intently. "A terrible accident!
+I would have done anything, gone any distance, to avoid it. I am unable,
+with you, to pretend--that's curious--and that in itself gives me a
+feeling of helplessness. All sorts of impossible things are coming into
+my head to say to you. I mustn't." Her voice was brittle.
+
+"There is no need for you to say what would make you miserable," he
+replied. "I am not in a position to question you; at the same time I
+can't pretend--perhaps the safest thing of all--not to understand what,
+entirely against your will, I've seen. I am very much, very naturally,
+disturbed by it; but you have nothing to worry about."
+
+"You say that because you don't know, you can't possibly think, what
+goes on here," she pressed a hand to her breast. "Why," her words were
+blurred in a mounting panic, "I have lost my sense of shame with you.
+It's gone." She gazed despairingly around as if she expected to see that
+restraining quality embodied and recoverable in the propriety of the
+room. "I'm frightened," she gasped. Lee rose instinctively, and moved
+toward her with a gesture of reassurance, but she cried, "Don't! don't!
+don't!" three times with an increasing dread. He went back to his chair.
+
+"Now I have to--I want to--tell you about it," she went on rapidly; "it
+has always been in me as long as I can remember, when I was hardly more
+than a child sitting alone; and I have always been afraid and ashamed.
+The nicest thing to call it is feeling; but in such an insane degree;
+at night it comes over me in waves, like a warm sea. I wanted and wanted
+love. But not in the little amounts that satisfied the others--the men
+and girls together. I couldn't do any of the small things they did with
+safety: this--this feeling would sweep up over me and I'd think I was
+going to die.
+
+"All that I had inherited and been told made me sure that I was horridly
+immodest; I wouldn't, if it could be helped at all, let anyone see
+inside me; I couldn't have men touch me; and whenever I began to like
+one I ran. It was disgusting, I was brought up to believe; I thought
+there was something wrong with me, that I was a bad girl; and I
+struggled, oh, for days on end, to keep it hidden."
+
+It was strange, Lee told himself, that marriage, the birth of her son,
+hadn't made her more happily normal; and, as if she had perceived his
+thoughts, she added, "Even from William. It would have shocked him,
+sickened him, really, more than the rest. He had to dominate me, be
+masculine, and I had to be modest, pursued--when I could have killed
+him." Her emotion swept her to her feet. "But I was, he thought, proper;
+although it tore and beat and pounded me till I was more often ill than
+not. Young William nearly grew up and, because of him, I was sure I had
+controlled it; but he was killed. Still, in five or six years it would
+be over; and now you, I--"
+
+"Nothing has happened," he heavily reiterated; "nothing has or can
+happen. We are neither of us completely young; and, as you say, in a few
+years all will be over, solved. We are both, it seems, happily married."
+She interrupted him to cry, "Is anyone happily married? Don't we fool
+ourselves and doesn't life fool us?"
+
+"It's the best course in a bad affair."
+
+"Bah!" She was infuriated at him. "You are like the others--worms in
+chestnuts. It is bad because you are contented. I hate life as much as
+you do, far more; but I am not satisfied; how could anyone be?"
+
+He, too, had risen, and stood close before her. "Don't make a mistake
+about me," he warned her; "there are a great many men whom it would be
+safer to tell this to. If I haven't had such a sharp struggle as you,
+I've been wondering--yes, when I should have been happiest--about the
+uselessness of most of living. I'm not safe at all."
+
+"I don't want to be safe," she whispered.
+
+With an involuntary and brutal movement he took her in his arms and
+kissed her with a flame-like and intolerable passion. She made no effort
+to avoid him, but met his embrace with an intensity that rivalled his
+own. When he released her she wavered and half fell on a chair across
+the low back of which her arm hung supinely. The lightning, he thought,
+had struck him. Winding in and through his surging, tempestuous emotion
+was an objective realization of what was happening to him: this wasn't
+a comfortable, superficially sensual affair such as he had had with
+Anette. He had seen, in steel mills, great shops with perspectives of
+tremendous irresistible machines, and now he had the sensation of having
+been thrown, whirling, among them.
+
+Savina's head went so far back that her throat was strained in a white
+bow. He kissed her again, with his hands crushing the cool metallic
+filaments of the artificial flowers on her shoulders. She exclaimed,
+"Oh!" in a small startled unfamiliar voice. This would not do, he told
+himself deliberately, with a separate emphasis on each word. William
+Grove might conceivably come in at any moment; and there was no hope,
+no possibility, of his wife quickly regaining her balance; she was as
+shattered, as limply weak, as though she were in a faint. "Savina,"
+he said, using for the first time that name, "you must get yourself
+together; I can't have you exposed like this to accident."
+
+She smiled wanly, in response, and then sat upright moving her body, her
+arms, with an air of insuperable weariness. Her expression was dazed;
+but, instinctively, she rearranged her slightly disordered hair.
+
+"We must find out what has happened to us," he went on, speaking with
+difficulty out of the turmoil of his being. "We are not young," he
+repeated stupidly; "and not foolish. We won't let ourselves be carried
+away beyond--beyond return."
+
+"You are so wise," she assented, with an entire honesty of intention;
+but her phrase mocked him ferociously.
+
+The tide of his own emotion was gathering around him with the force of
+a sea like that of which she had already, vividly, spoken. There was
+damned little of what could be recognized as admissible wisdom in him.
+Instead of that he was being inundated by a recklessness of desire that
+reached Savina's desperate indifference to what, however threatening,
+might overtake her. He couldn't, he hadn't the inclination to, do less.
+Reaching up, she drew her fingers down his sleeves until they rested in
+his gripping hands. Her palms clung to his, and then she broke away from
+him:
+
+"I want to be outraged!" Her low ringing cry seemed suppressed,
+deadened, as though the damask and florid gilt and rosewood, now
+inexpressibly shocked, had combined to muffle the expression, the agony,
+of her body. Even Lee Randon was appalled before the nakedness left by
+the tearing away of everything imposed upon her. She should have said
+that, he realized, unutterably sad, long ago, to William Grove. But,
+instead, she had told him; and, whatever the consequences might be, he
+must meet them. He had searched for this, for the potency in which lay
+the meaning of Cytherea, and he had found it. He had looked for trouble,
+and it was his in the realization alone that he could not, now, go home
+tomorrow morning.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+In his room the tropical fruits and whiskey and cigarettes were by his
+bed, the percolator ready for morning; and, stopping in his preparations
+for the night, he mixed himself a drink and sat moodily over it. What
+had happened downstairs seemed, more than anything else, astounding;
+Mrs. Grove, Savina, had bewildered him with the power, the bitterness,
+of her feeling. At the thought of her shaken with passionate emotion
+his own nerves responded and the racing of his blood was audible in his
+head. What had happened he didn't regret; dwelling on it, the memory was
+almost as sharply pleasant as the reality; yet he wasn't concerned with
+the present, but of the future--tomorrow.
+
+He should, probably, get home late in the afternoon or in the evening;
+and what he told himself was that he wouldn't come back to the Groves,
+to Savina. The risk, the folly, was too great. Recalling his conclusions
+about the attachments of men of his age, he had no illusion about the
+possibly ideal character of an intimacy with William Grove's wife; she,
+as well, had illuminated that beyond any obscurity of motive or
+ultimate result. Lee's mind shifted to a speculation about the cause of
+their--their accident. No conscious act, no desire, of his had brought
+it on them; and it was evident that no conscious wish of hers had
+materialized their unrestrainable kisses. Savina's life, beyond
+question, must have been largely spent in hiding, combatting, her
+secret--the fact that her emotion was too great for life.
+
+However, Lee Randon didn't try to tell himself that no other man had
+shared his discovery; indeed, Savina, too, had wisely avoided that
+challenge to his experience and wisdom. Like her he deliberately turned
+away from the past; and, in the natural chemistry of that act, the
+provision for his masculine egotism, it was dissolved into nothingness.
+He was concentrated on the incident in the library: dancing with her,
+he had held her in a far greater, a prolonged, intimacy of contact;
+something in the moment, a surprising of her defences, a slight
+weariness in a struggle which must often seem to her unendurable, had
+betrayed her. Nothing, then, than what had occurred, could have been
+farther from his mind; he had never connected Mrs. Grove with such a
+possibility; she hadn't, the truth was, at first attracted him in
+that way. Now he thought that he had been blind to have missed her
+resemblance to Cytherea. She was Cytherea! This, in a measure, accounted
+for him, since, with so much to consider, he badly needed an accounting.
+It wasn't simply, here, that he had kissed a married woman; there was
+nothing revolutionary or specially threatening in that; it was the
+sensation of danger, of lightning, the recognition of that profoundly
+disturbing countenance, which filled him with gravity and a determined
+plan of restraint.
+
+He recalled the fact that both Peyton Morris and Mina had insisted that
+they had not been responsible for what had overtaken them; at the
+time he had not credited this, he was certain that some significant
+preliminaries had been indulged in; but positively Savina and he had
+been swept off their feet. A sense of helplessness, of the
+extreme danger of existence, permeated and weakened his opposing
+determination--he had no choice, no freedom of will; nothing august,
+in him or outside, had come to his assistance. In addition to this, he
+was--as in maturity he had always been--without a convenient recognition
+of right and wrong. What he principally felt about Savina was a helpless
+sense of tragedy, that and a hatred for the world, for the tepid
+society, which had no use for high passion.
+
+To have kissed her, under the circumstances, appeared to him not only
+natural, but inevitable; and he was suffering from no feeling of guilt;
+neither toward William Grove, in whose house he was a guest, nor to
+Fanny--those widely heralded attitudes were largely a part of a public
+hypocrisy which had no place in the attempted honesty of his thoughts.
+Lee was merely mapping out a course in the direction of worldly wisdom.
+Then, inconsistently leaving that promise of security, he reviewed every
+moment, every thrilling breath, with Savina Grove after the Davencotts
+had gone: he felt, in exact warm similitude, her body pressed against
+his, her parted lips; he heard the little escaping "Ah!" of her fervor.
+
+He put his glass down abruptly and tramped from wall to wall, his
+unbuttoned silk waistcoat swinging about his arms. Lee Randon now cursed
+himself, he cursed Savina, but most of all he cursed William Grove,
+sleeping in complacent ignorance beside his wife. His imagination,
+aroused and then defrauded, became violent, wilfully obscene, and
+his profanity emerged from thought to rasping sound. His forehead, he
+discovered, was wet, and he dropped once more into the chair by the
+laden tray, took a deep drink from a fresh concoction. "This won't
+do," he said; "it's crazy." And he resumed the comforting relief that
+tomorrow would be different: he'd say good-bye to the Groves together
+and, in four hours, he'd be back in Eastlake. The children, if he took
+a late train, would be in bed, and Fanny, with her feet on the stool,
+engaged with her fancy work.
+
+Then his revolving thoughts took him back to the unanswered mystery
+of what, actually, had happened to Savina and him. He lost her for
+Cytherea, he lost Cytherea in her; the two, the immobile doll and the
+woman torn with vitality, merged to confound him. In the consideration
+of Savina and himself, he discovered that they, too, were alike;
+yet, while he had looked for a beauty, a quality, without a name, a
+substance, Savina wanted a reality every particle of which she had
+experienced and achingly knew. He, more or less, was troubled by a
+vision, but her necessity was recognizable in flesh. There, it might be
+again, she was more fortunate, stronger, superior. It didn't matter.
+
+No inclination to sleep drugged the activity of his mind or promised him
+the release, the medicine, of a temporary oblivion. He had a recurrence
+of the rebellious spirit, in which he wondered if Grove did sleep in
+the same room with Savina. And then increasingly he got what he called
+a hold on himself. All that troubled him seemed to lift, to melt into a
+state where the hopeless was irradiated with tender memories. His
+mood changed to a pervasive melancholy in which he recalled the lost
+possibilities of his early ambitions, the ambitions that, without form
+or encouragement, had gone down before definite developments. When he
+spoke of these, tentatively, to Fanny, she always replied serenely that
+she was thankful for him as he was, she would not have liked him to be
+anything queer.
+
+But if he had met Savina first, and married her, his career would have
+been something else entirely; now, probably--so fiercely their
+combined flame would have burned--it would be over. However, during its
+course--he drew in a long audible breath. It was no good thinking
+of that! He completed his preparations for the night; but he still
+lingered, some of the drink remained. Lee was glad that he had grown
+quieter, reflective, middle-aged; it was absurd, undignified, for him to
+imitate the transports of the young. It pleased him, though, to realize
+that he wasn't done, extinguished, yet; he might play court tennis--it
+wasn't as violent as racquets or squash--and get back a little of his
+lapsed agility; better still, he'd ride more, take three days a week,
+he could well afford to, instead of only Saturday and holidays in the
+country.
+
+It was a mistake to disparage continually the life, the pleasures and
+friends, he had--the friends he had gathered through long arduous years
+of effort. He must grow more familiar with Helena and Gregory, too; no
+one had handsomer or finer children. And there was Fanny--for one friend
+of his she had ten; she was universally liked and admired. Lee was, at
+last, in bed; but sleep continued to evade him. He didn't fall asleep,
+but sank into a waking dose; his mind was clear, but not governed by
+his conscious will; it seemed to him that there was no Savina Grove, but
+only Cytherea; her smile, her fascination, everywhere followed him. A
+damned funny business, life! At times its secret, the meaning of love,
+was almost clear, and then, about to be freed by knowledge, his thoughts
+would break, grow confused, and leave him still baffled.
+
+Lee Randon was startled to find the brightness of morning penetrating
+his eyes; ready for his bath, with the percolator choking and bubbling
+in the next room, he rehearsed, reaffirmed, all that he had decided the
+night before. No one was with him at the breakfast table elaborate with
+repousse silver and embroidered linen and iced fruit; but, returning
+upstairs, he saw Savina in her biscuit-colored suit in the library.
+"William had to go to Washington," she told him; "he left his regrets."
+She was, Lee perceived, almost haggard, with restless hands; but
+she didn't avoid his gaze. She stood by the table, one hand, gloved,
+slightly behind her on it. Bending forward he kissed her more intently,
+more passionately, more wholly, than ever before.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"I hadn't meant to do that," he said; but his speech was only
+mechanical, as though, when he had once made it up, it discharged
+itself, in a condition where it was no longer valid, in spite of him.
+Savina replied with a silent smile. Her drawn appearance had gone; she
+was animated, sparkling, with vitality; even her body seemed fuller.
+
+"We shall have a long unbroken day together," she told him; "I have to
+go out for an hour, and then it will begin, here, I think, with lunch."
+
+"I ought to be back in Eastlake," he confessed.
+
+"Don't think of that till it comes. Eastlake has had you a long time,
+compared with a day. But there are days and days." They kissed each
+other. "I'll go now." She kissed Lee. "Lunch will be at two." He kissed
+her. He didn't leave the library until a maid announced that lunch was
+ready and the fact of her return. At the table they spoke but little;
+Lee Randon was enveloped in a luxurious feeling--where Savina was
+concerned--of security; there was no need to hurry; the day lengthened
+out into the night and an infinity of happy minutes and opportunities.
+They discussed, however, what to do with it.
+
+"I'd like to go out to dinner," she decided; "and then a theatre, but
+nothing more serious than a spectacle: any one of the Follies. I am sick
+of Carnegie Hall and pianists and William's solemn box at the Opera; and
+afterwards we'll go back to that café and drink champagne and dance."
+
+That, he declared, with a small inner sinking at the thought of Fanny,
+would be splendid. "And this afternoon--?"
+
+"We'll be together."
+
+They returned to the library--more secluded from servants and callers
+than the rooms on the lower floor--where, at one end of the massive
+lounge, they smoked and Savina talked. "I hardly went to sleep at all,"
+she admitted; "I thought of you every second. Do you think your wife
+would like me?" She asked the vain question which no woman in her
+situation seemed able to avoid.
+
+"Of course," he lied heroically.
+
+"I want her to, although I can't, somehow, connect you with her; I
+can't see you married. No doubt because I don't want to; it makes me
+wretched." She half turned in his arms, pressed hard against him, and
+plunged her gaze into his.
+
+"It often seems strange to me," he admitted, caught in the three-fold
+difficulty of the truth, his feeling for her, and a complete niceness
+in whatever touched Fanny. He attempted to explain. "Everything about
+my home is perfect, but, at times, and I can't make out why, it doesn't
+seem mine. It might, from the way I feel, belong to another man--the
+house and Fanny and the children. I stand in it all as though I had
+suddenly waked from a dream, as though what were around me had lasted
+somehow from the dream into life." He repeated to her the process of his
+thoughts, feelings, at once so familiar and inexplicable.
+
+She wasn't, he found, deeply interested in his explanation; she was
+careless of anything but the immediate present. Savina never mentioned
+William Grove. Animated by countless tender inventive expressions of her
+passion, she gave the impression of listening to the inflections of his
+voice rather than attending, considering, its meanings. She was more
+fully surrendered to the situation than he. The disorganized fragments
+of a hundred ideas and hints poured in rapid succession, back of
+his dominating emotion, through Lee's brain. He lost himself only in
+waves--the similitude to the sea persisted--regular, obliterating, but
+separate. Savina was far out in a tideless deep that swept the solidity
+of no land.
+
+She was plastically what he willed; blurred, drunk, with sensation, she
+sat clasping rigidly the edge of his coat. But his will, he discovered,
+was limited: the surges of physical desire, rising and inundating,
+saturating him, broke continually and left him with the partly-formed
+whirling ideas. He named, to himself, the thing that hung over them;
+he considered it and put it away; he deferred the finality of
+their emotion. In this he was inferior, he became even slightly
+ridiculous--they couldn't continue kissing each other with the same
+emphasis hour after hour, and the emphasis could not be indefinitely
+multiplied; rather than meet the crescendo he drew into his region of
+cental obscurity.
+
+Lee had to do this, he reminded himself, in view of Savina's utter
+surrender: he was responsible for whatever happened. Even here his
+infernal queerness--that the possession of the flesh wasn't what
+primarily moved him--was pursuing him: a peculiarity, he came to think,
+dangerously approaching the abnormal. In addition to that, however, he
+was not ready, prepared, to involve his future; for that, with Savina
+Grove, was most probable to follow. Fanny was by no means absent from
+his mind, his wife and certain practical realities. And, as he had told
+himself before, he was not a seducer. What adventures he had accepted
+had been the minor experiments of his restlessness, and they all ended
+in the manner that had finished him with Anette, in dissatisfaction and
+a sense of waste.
+
+Savina stirred and sighed. "I must ring for tea," she said regretfully;
+and, while the servant arranged the pots and decanters and pitchers,
+the napkins and filled dishes, Lee paced up and down, smoking. When they
+were again alone her fingers stole under his arm:
+
+"I adore you for--for everything." She had evaded the purpose of her
+speech. He wondered, with the exasperation of his over-wrought physical
+suspense, if she did. His ravishment had suffered a sharp natural
+decline reflected in a mental gloom. For the moment he desired nothing,
+valued nothing. And, in this mood, he became talkative; he poured a
+storm of pessimistic observation over Savina; and she listened with a
+rapt, transported, attention. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun,
+in a silence coincident with dusk. The room slowly lost its sombre color
+and the sense of the confining walls; it became grey and apparently
+limitless; as monotonous, Lee Randon thought, as life. He was disturbed
+by a new feeling: that perversely, trivially, he had spoiled what should
+have been a priceless afternoon. It would never come back; what a fool
+he had been to waste in aimless talk any of the few hours which together
+they owned.
+
+He whispered this to Savina, in his arms; but she would permit no
+criticism of him. It was time, she discovered, for them to dress for
+their party: "I don't want you to go. Why can't you be with me? But
+then, the servants! Lee, I am going to die when you leave. Tell me, how
+can I live, what am I to do, without you?" Since no satisfactory reply
+to that was possible, he stopped her troubled voice with a kiss. It was
+remarkable how many they had exchanged.
+
+He had the feeling, the hope, that, with nothing irrevocable
+consummated, their parting would be easier; but he began to lose that
+comfortable assurance. Again in his room, in the heavy choking folds of
+velvet draperies, he was grave; the mere excitation of the night before
+had gone. What was this, he asked himself, that he had got into? What
+had Cytherea to do with it? Ungallantly the majority of his thoughts
+were engaged with the possibility, the absolute necessity, of escape. By
+God, he must get out of it, or rather, get it out of him! But it wasn't
+too late; he could even finish the day, this delight, with safety.
+Savina would recover--she had already thanked him for his self-control.
+
+It was fortunate that she was a woman of distinction, of
+responsibilities, with a delicate habit of mind; another might have
+brought disaster, followed him to Eastlake. He recalled a story of
+George Sand tearing off her bodice before the house of a man she loved.
+Yet... why hadn't he gone quietly away, early in the morning, before
+Savina was up? He was appalled at the depths to which he had fallen, the
+ignominious appearance that interrogated him from the pier-glass; Lee
+saw himself in the light of a coward--a cheap, safe sensation-maker.
+Nothing was more contemptible. Damn it to hell, what was he? Where was
+he? Either he ought to go home or not, and the not carried the fullest
+possible significance. But he didn't want to do one or the other--he
+wanted Cytherea, or Savina, on some absurd impracticable plane, and
+Fanny too. Why couldn't he go home when home was uppermost in his
+thoughts and do something else when it wasn't? Did the fact that Fanny
+might happen to want him annul all his liberty in living; or, in place
+of that, were they, in spirit and body, one?
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It was inevitable to the vacillating state of his being that, finding
+Savina in an exceptionally engaging black dress with floating sleeves of
+sheer lace and a string of rare pearls, he should forget all his doubts
+in the pleasure of their intimacy. Even now, in response to his gaze,
+her face lost its usual composure and became pinched, stricken, with
+feeling. Lee Randon was possessed by a recklessness that hardened him
+to everything but the present moment: such times were few in existence,
+hours of vivid living which alone made the dull weight of years
+supportable. This belonged to Savina and him; they were accountable only
+to each other. It was a sensation like the fortunate and exhilarating
+effect of exactly the right amount of wine. The emotion that flooded
+them had freed Lee from responsibility; sharpening one set of
+perceptions, it had obliterated the others, creating a spirit of holiday
+from which nothing prosaic, utilitarian, should detract.
+
+They hadn't yet decided where to go for dinner; and, drawing aside
+into a small reception room to embrace and consider, they selected the
+Lafayette, because its Continental air assisted the illusion of their
+escape from all that was familiar and perfunctory. Their table, by
+a railing overlooking the sweep of the salle à manger, was precisely
+placed for their happiness. It was so narrow that the heels of Savina's
+slippers were sharply pressed into his insteps; when her hand fell
+forward it rested on his. Lee ordered a great deal, of which very little
+was eaten; the hors d'oeuvre appeared and vanished, followed by the
+soup and an entrée; a casserole spread the savory odor of its contents
+between them; the salad was crisply, palely green, and ignored; and,
+before it seemed humanly possible, he had his cigar and was stirring the
+French coffee.
+
+"Shall we be late for the theatre?" he asked indifferently.
+
+"I haven't the least interest in it," Savina assured him; "I can't
+imagine why we bought the seats. Why did we, Lee, when we have each
+other?"
+
+"Our own private Folly." He smiled at her.
+
+"Not that," she reproved him; "I can't bear to think of it in a small
+way. Why, it will be all I'll ever have--I shall never think of anyone
+else like this again; and you'll go back, you'll go away. But I hope
+you won't forget me, not at once--you must keep me in your heart for a
+little."
+
+"I'll never be able to get you out," he declared.
+
+"You want to, then, and I am--" She lost control of herself as though
+she had passed into a hypnosis, uniquely frozen with passion, incapable
+of movement, of the accommodation of her sight; her breathing was slow,
+almost imperceptible in its shallowness. "I am a part of you," Savina
+went on when she had recovered. "It would kill me if I weren't. But it
+does mean something." Her heel cut until he thought he was bleeding.
+
+"What?" he asked, through the thin azure smoke of the cigar. She shook
+her head contentedly:
+
+"I don't care; I have--now, anyway--what I wish, what I've always wished
+for--you. I didn't know it was you right away, how could I? Not even
+when we had tea, and talked about Mina and your young Morris, that first
+afternoon. It was the next day before I understood. Why wasn't it long
+long ago, when I was a girl, twelve years old? Yes, quite that early.
+Isn't it queer, Lee, how I have been troubled by love? It bothers hardly
+anyone else, it scarcely touches the rest. There is a lot of talk
+about it, but, all the while, people detest it. They are always wearing
+dresses and pretentions they can't afford to have mussed. It--I am still
+talking of love, Lee darling--breaks up their silly society and morals
+... like a strong light thrown on something shabby."
+
+Once more he had the feeling that, before the actuality of Savina's
+tragic necessity, his own speculations were merely visionary,
+immaterial; yet he tried to put them into words, to explain, so far as
+he was able, what it was in him that was hers. But he did this omitting,
+perhaps, the foundation of all that he was trying to say--he didn't
+speak of Cytherea. He avoided putting the doll into words because he
+could think of none that would make his meaning, his attachment, clear.
+Lee couldn't, very well, across the remnants of dinner, admit to Savina
+that a doll bought out of a confectioner's window on Fifth Avenue so
+deeply influenced him. He hadn't lost Cytherea in Savina so much as,
+vitalized, he had found her. And, while he had surrendered completely
+to the woman and emotion, at the same time the immaterial aspect of his
+search, if he could so concretely define it, persisted. The difference
+between Savina and himself was this: while she was immersed,
+obliterated, satisfied, in her passion, a part of him, however small,
+stayed aside. It didn't control him, but simply went along, like a
+diminutive and wondering child he had by the hand.
+
+Cytherea, at this moment, would be softly illuminated by the shifting
+glow of the fire and, remote in her magical perspective, would seem at
+the point of moving, of beckoning for him with her lifted hand.
+
+"What were you seeing in the smoke?" Savina asked; and he replied with
+an adequate truth, "You."
+
+"Why not just look at me, then, instead of staring?"
+
+"I see you everywhere."
+
+"Adorable," she whispered.
+
+No such name, no terms of endearment, occurred to him for her; why, he
+didn't know; but they had no place in his present situation. He had to
+think of Savina as removed from whatever had described and touched
+other special women. The words which had always been the indispensable
+property of such affairs were now distasteful to him. They seemed to
+have a smoothly false, a brassy, ring; while he was fully, even gaily,
+committed, he had a necessity to make his relationship with Savina Grove
+wholly honest. As he paid the account she asked him if he were rich.
+
+"Your husband wouldn't think so," he replied; "yet I am doing well
+enough; I can afford dinner and the theatre."
+
+"I wish you had a very great deal of money."
+
+"Why?" He gazed at her curiously.
+
+"It's so useful," Savina told him generally; but that, he felt, was not
+completely what was in her mind. "What I have," she went on, "is quite
+separate from William's. It is my mother's estate."
+
+"My brother, Daniel, has done very well in Cuba," Lee commented. Savina
+was interested:
+
+"I have never been there; cooler climates are supposed to suit my heart
+better; but I know I should love it--the close burning days and intense
+nights."
+
+"Daniel tells me there's usually the trade wind at night." His voice
+reflected his lack of concern.
+
+"I have a feeling," she persisted, "that I am more of Havana than I am,
+for example, of Islesboro. Something in the tropics and the people,
+the Spanish! Those dancing girls in gorgeous shawls, they haven't any
+clothes underneath; and that nakedness, the violence of their passions,
+the danger and the knives and the windows with iron bars, stir me. It's
+all so different from New York. I want to burn up with a red flower in
+my hair and not cool into stagnation."
+
+They were in her closed automobile, where it was faintly scented by
+roses yellow and not crimson. She sat upright, withdrawn from him, with
+her hands clenched in her lap. How she opposed every quality of Mina
+Raff's; what a contradiction the two women, equally vital, presented.
+And Fanny, perhaps no less forceful, was still another individual. Lee
+Randon was appalled at the power lying in the fragile persons of women.
+It controlled the changeless and fateful elements of life; while the
+strength of men, it occurred to him further, was concerned with such
+secondary affairs as individual ambitions and a struggle eternally
+condemned to failure.
+
+Savina relaxed, every instinct and nerve turned toward him, but they
+were at the theatre.
+
+The performance had been on, an usher told them, for almost three
+quarters of an hour. Their seats were in the fifth row, the middle;
+and there was an obscured resentful stirring as they took their places.
+Plunged into darkness, their hands and shoulders and knees met. Savina,
+scarcely above her breath, said "Ah!" uncontrollably; she was so charged
+with emotion that her body seemed to vibrate, a bewildering warmness
+stole through him from her; and once more, finally, he sank into
+questionless depths. The brightness of the stage, at first, had no more
+form nor meaning than the whirling pattern of a kaleidoscope, against
+which the people around him were unsubstantial silhouettes, blind to the
+ardor that merged Savina and him into one sentient form alone in a world
+of shadows.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The spectacle on the stage, Russian in motive, was set in harmonized
+barbaric color--violent movements under a diffused light: in the
+background immobile peasant-like figures held tall many-branched
+candlesticks; there were profane gold mitres, vivid stripes and morocco
+leather; cambric chemises slipping from breasts and the revelation of
+white thighs. It floated, like a vision of men's desire realized in
+beautiful and morbid symbols, above the darkened audience; it took what,
+in the throng, was imperfect, fragmentary, and spent, but still strong,
+brutal, formless, and converted it into a lovely and sterile pantomime.
+Yet there was no sterility in what had, primarily, animated it; the
+change, it seemed, had been from use to ornament, from purpose to a
+delight with no issue beyond that. Over it there hung, for Lee Randon,
+the pale radiance of Cytherea.
+
+Other visions and spectacles followed, they melted one into the next,
+sensations roused by the flexible plaited thongs of desire. Lee,
+stupefied in the heavy air of his own sensuality, saw the pictorial life
+on the stage as an accompaniment, the visualization, of his obsession.
+It was over suddenly, with a massing of form and sound; Lee and Savina
+Grove were pitilessly drowned in light. Crushed together in the crowded,
+slowly emptying aisle, her pliable body, under its wrap, followed his
+every movement.
+
+On the street, getting into the automobile, she directed Adamson to
+drive through the park. "I don't want to go to the Malmaison," she told
+Lee. Her ungloved fingers worked a link from his cuff and her hand crept
+up his arm. The murmur of her voice was ceaseless, like a low running
+and running over melodious keys. Then, in a tone no louder, but changed,
+unexpected, she said:
+
+"Lee, I love you."
+
+It startled him; its effect was profound--now that it had been said he
+was completely delivered to his gathering sense of the inevitable.
+It secured, like a noose, all his intentions; he was neither glad nor
+sorry; what was the use? His own feeling--if this were love and what
+love was--eluded him. Above every other recognition, though, was a
+consciousness of impending event. What happened now, in the car rapidly
+approaching Central Park, was unimportant, without power to contain
+him in its moment. They turned in at the Fifty-ninth Street entrance:
+through the glass there was a shifting panorama of black branches,
+deserted walks and benches and secretive water. He saw vaguely the
+Belvedere, the Esplanade fountain, and the formal length of the Mall,
+together with--flung against the sky--the multitudinous lighted windows
+of Central Park West, the high rippling shimmer of the monumental lifted
+electric signs on Broadway. Other cars passed, swift and soundless,
+he saw their occupants and then they were gone: an aged man whose grey
+countenance might have been moulded in sand with a frigid trained nurse;
+a couple desperately embracing in a taxi-cab; a knot of chattering women
+in dinner dresses and open furs; another alone, painted, at once hard
+and conciliatory, hurrying to an appointment.
+
+The tension, his suspense, increased until he thought it must burst
+out the windows. Between the shudders and the kissing he kept wondering
+when.... It was Savina, at the speaking-tube, who commanded their
+return. They left the Park for Fifth Avenue, Sixty-sixth Street. Lee got
+out, but she didn't follow. He waited expectantly. The night had grown
+very much colder. Why, in the name of God, didn't she come?
+
+"In a moment" he heard her say faintly. But when she moved it was with
+decision; there was no hesitation in her manner of mounting the stone
+steps. The maid came forward as they entered, first to help Savina, and
+then to take Lee's hat and coat and stick. Savina turned to him, holding
+out her hand, speaking in a high steady voice:
+
+"Thank you very much--wasn't it nice?--and good-night." Without another
+word, giving him no opportunity to speak, to reply, she turned neither
+hurried nor slow to the stairway.
+
+He was dumfounded, and showed it, he was sure, in the stupidity of his
+fixed gesture of surprise. The emotion choked in his throat was bitter
+with a sense of ill-treatment. To cover his confusion, he searched
+obviously through his pockets for a cigarette case which he had left,
+he knew, in his overcoat. Then, when the servant had retired, he
+softly cursed. However, the bitterness, his anger, were soon lost in
+bewilderment; that, with the appearance of resolving itself into a
+further mystery, carried him up to his room. With a mixed drink on a
+dressing-case, he wandered aimlessly around, his brain occupied with one
+question, one possibility.
+
+Piece by piece, at long intervals, he removed his clothes, found his
+pajamas and dressing-gown, and washed. The drink he discovered later
+untouched and he consumed it almost at a gulp. Lee poured out another,
+and a third; but they had no effect on him.
+
+In spite of them he suffered a mild collapse of the nerves; his hands
+were without feeling, at once like marble and wet with sweat; his heart
+raced. A pervading weariness and discouragement followed this. He was
+in a hellish mess, he told himself fiercely. The bravado of the words
+temporarily gave him more spirit; yet there was nothing he could do
+but go to bed. Nothing else had been even hinted at; he turned off the
+lights and opened the windows. Flares of brightness continued to pass
+before his eyes, and, disinclined to the possibilities of sleep, he
+propped himself up with an extra pillow. Then, illogically, he wondered
+if he had locked the door; at the instant of rising to find out, he
+restrained himself--if, subconsciously, he had, chance and not he had
+worked; for or against him, what did it matter?
+
+He looked at the illuminated dial of his watch; the hands, the numerals,
+greenly phosphorescent, were sharp; it was midnight. After apparently an
+interminable wait he looked again--six minutes past twelve. The rumble
+of an elevated train approached, hung about the room, and receded. Death
+could be no more dragging than this. Why, then, didn't he fall asleep?
+Lee went over and over every inflection of Savina's final words to
+him; in them he tried, but vainly, to find encouragement, promise, any
+decision or invitation. What, in the short passage from the automobile
+to the house, could have so wholly changed, frozen, her? Had she, at
+that late opportunity, remembering the struggle, the tragic unrelenting
+need, to keep herself aloof from passion, once more successfully fled?
+Was she--he was almost dozing--Cytherea, the unobtainable?
+
+He woke, stirred, convulsively: it was after one o'clock now. The
+craving for a cigarette finally moved him; and, in the dark, he felt
+around for those, the Dimitrinos, on the tray. The cigarette at an end,
+he sank back on the pillows, deciding that he must take the earliest
+train possible toward Eastlake. He had missed a directors' meeting
+today, and there was another tomorrow that he must attend, at his
+office. Then he grew quieter; the rasping of his nerves ceased; it
+was as though, suddenly, they had all been loosened, the strung wires
+unturned. What a remarkable adventure he had been through; not a
+detail of it would ever fade from his memory--a secret alleviation for
+advancing old age, impotence. And this, the most romantic occurrence of
+his life, had happened when he was middle-aged, forty-seven and worse,
+to be exact. He looked again at his watch, but now only from a lingering
+uncertain curiosity. It was five minutes of two.
+
+The present peace that settled over him seemed the most valuable thing
+life had to offer; it was not like the end of effort, but resembled a
+welcome truce, a rest with his force unimpaired, from which he would
+wake to the tonic winter realities of tomorrow. An early train--
+
+In the act of dropping, half asleep, into the position of slumber, he
+halted sharply, propped up on an elbow. A sense invaded him of something
+unusual, portentous, close by. There wasn't a sound, a flicker of
+audible movement, a break in the curtain of dark; yet he was breathless
+in a strained oppressive attention. It was impossible to say whether his
+disturbance came from within or without, whether it was in his pounding
+blood or in the room around him. Then he heard a soft thick settling
+rustle, the sound a fur coat might make falling to the floor; and,
+simultaneously, a vague slender whiteness appeared on the night. A swift
+conviction fastened on him that here he had been overtaken by fate;
+by what, for so long, he had invited. Out of the insubstantiality a
+whispering voice spoke to him:
+
+"Lee, where are you? It's so cold."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+Twice, the following day, Lee telephoned to Fanny, but neither time was
+she in the house; and, kept at his office, he was obliged to take an
+inconvenient train that made a connection for Eastlake. When Lee reached
+the countryside opening in the familiar hilly vistas he had, in place of
+the usual calm recognitions through a run of hardly more than an hour, a
+sense of having come a long way to a scene from which he had been
+absent for years. It appeared to him remarkably tranquil and
+self-contained--safe was the word which came to him. He was glad to
+be there, but at indeterminate stations rather than in Eastlake. He
+dreaded, for no plainly comprehended reason, his return home. The
+feelings that, historically, he should have owned were all absent. Had
+it been possible he would have cancelled the past forty-eight hours;
+but Lee was forced to admit to himself that he was not invaded by a very
+lively sense of guilt. He made a conventional effort to see his act
+in the light of a grave fault--whatever was attached to the charge of
+adultery--but it failed before the conviction that the whole thing was
+sad.
+
+His sorrow was for Savina, for the suffering of her past, the ordeal of
+the present, and the future dreariness. There had been no suggestion of
+wrong in her surrender, no perceptible consciousness of shame: it
+was exactly as though, struggling to the limit of endurance against a
+powerful adverse current, she had turned and swept with it. The fact was
+that the entire situation was utterly different from the general
+social and moral conception of it; and Lee began to wonder which were
+stronger--the individual truth or the imposed dogmatic weight of the
+world. But the latter, he added, would know nothing of this. Concisely,
+there was to be no repetition of last night; there would be no affair.
+
+Lee Randon had completely and sharply focussed the most adverse possible
+attitude toward that: he saw it without a redeeming feature and bare
+of any chance of pleasure. His need for honesty, however special, was
+outraged on every facet by the thought of an intrigue. Lee reconstructed
+it in every detail--he saw the moments, doubtful and hurried and
+surreptitious, snatched in William Grove's house; the servants,
+with their penetration of the tone of an establishment, knowing and
+insufferable; he lived over the increasing dissatisfaction with quick
+embraces in the automobile, and the final indignities of lying names and
+rooms of pandering and filthy debasement. The almost inevitable exposure
+followed, the furies and hysterical reproaches. That, indeed, would
+have involved them fatally: in such circumstances the world would be
+invincible, crushing; holding solidly its front against such dangerous
+assault, it would have poured over Savina and him a conviction of sin in
+which they would unavoidably have perished.
+
+As it was, he had told her--with, in himself, the feeling of a
+considerable discovery--that they were to a marked degree superior:
+he could find no more remorse at his heart than Savina showed. This,
+exactly, was his inner conviction--that, since he had given something
+not in Fanny's possession, he had robbed her of nothing. It was a new
+idea to him and it required careful thought, a slow justification. It
+answered, perhaps, once and for all, his question about the essential
+oneness of marriage. Yes, that was a misconception; marriage in an ideal
+state he wasn't considering, but only his own individual position. To
+love but one woman through this life and into a next would be blissful
+... if it were possible; there might be a great deal saved--but by
+someone else--in heroically supporting such an Elysian tenet; Lee Randon
+definitely hadn't the necessary utopianism.
+
+Love wasn't a sacred fluid held in a single vessel of alabaster;
+marriage didn't conveniently create shortsightedness. Lee couldn't
+pretend to answer all this for women, or even in part for Savina.
+Her attitude, he knew, in that it never touched the abstract, was far
+simpler than his; she didn't regard herself as scarlet, but thought of
+the rest of the world as unendurably drab. The last thing she had said
+to him was that she was glad, glad, that it had happened. This, too, in
+Savina, had preserved them from the slightest suggestion of inferiority:
+the night assumed no resemblance to a disgraceful footnote on the page
+of righteousness. It was complete--and, by God, admirable!--within
+itself. No one, practically, would agree with him, and here, in the fact
+that no one ever could know, his better wisdom was shown.
+
+About love, the thing itself, his perceptions remained dim: he had loved
+Fanny enormously at the time of their wedding and he loved her now, so
+many years after; but his feeling--as he had tried so unfortunately to
+tell her--wasn't the same, it had grown calm; it had become peaceful,
+but an old tempestuous need had returned. Yet, until he had gone to the
+Groves', his restlessness had been trivial, hardly more than academic, a
+half-smiling interest in a doll; but now, after he had left the realm
+of fancy for an overt act, a full realization of his implication was
+imperative. Without it he would be unable to preserve any satisfactory
+life with Fanny at all; his uneasiness must merely increase, become
+intolerable. Certainly there was a great, it should be an inexhaustible,
+amount of happiness for him in his wife, his children and his home; he
+would grow old and negative with them, and there die.
+
+But a lot of mental re-adjustment, understanding, was necessary first.
+Suddenly the minor adventures and sensations of the past had become,
+even before the completeness of the affair with Savina, insuperably
+distasteful to him; he simply couldn't look forward to a procession
+of them reaching to impotence. No, no, no! That was never Cytherea's
+import. He didn't want to impoverish himself by the cheap flinging away
+of small coin from his ultimate store. He didn't, equally, wish to keep
+on exasperating Fanny in small ways. That pettiness was wholly to blame
+for what discomfort he had had. His wife's claim was still greater on
+him than any other's; and what, now, he couldn't give her must be made
+up in different ways. This conviction invested him with a fresh sense of
+dignity and an increasing regard for Fanny.
+
+What a shame it was that he could not go quietly to her with all this,
+tell her everything. A lie was rooted, concealed, beyond removal at the
+base of the honesty he planned. There was, of course, this additional
+phase of the difficulty--what had happened concerned Savina even more
+than it did his wife and him. He had Savina Grove, so entirely in his
+hands, to guard. And the innate animosity of women toward women was
+incalculable. That wasn't a new thought, but it recurred to him with
+special force. As much as he desired it, utter frankness, absolute
+safety, was impossible. Fanny's standard of duty, or responsibility, was
+worlds apart from his.
+
+Bitterly and without premeditation he cursed the tyranny of sex; in
+countless forms it dominated, dictated, every aspect of life. Men's
+conception of women was quite exclusively founded on it in its aspects
+of chastity or license. In the latter they deprecated the former, and in
+the first they condemned all trace of the latter. The result of this was
+that women, the prostitutes and the mothers alike, as well, had no
+other validity of judgment. The present marriage was hardly more than
+an exchange of the violation of innocence, or of acted innocence, for
+an adequate material consideration. If this were not true, why was
+innocence--a silly fact in itself--so insisted upon? Lee was forced
+to conclude however, that it was the fault of men: they turned, at an
+advancing age when it was possible to gather a comfortable competence,
+to the young. By that time their emotions were apt to be almost
+desperately variable.
+
+In his case it had been different--but life was different, easier, when
+he had married--and his wedding most appropriate to felicity. Yet that,
+against every apparent reason to the contrary, had vanished, and left
+him this calm determining of his fate. Through his thoughts a quirk of
+memory ran like a tongue of flame. He felt Savina's hand under his cuff;
+he felt her sliding, with her arms locked about his neck, out of her
+furs in the automobile; a white glimmer, a whisper, she materialized in
+the coldness of the night. There was a long-drawn wailing blast from the
+locomotive--they were almost entering the train-shed at Eastlake. When
+Fanny expected him, and it was possible, she met him at the station;
+but tonight he would have to depend on one of the rattling local
+motor hacks. Still, he looked for her and was faintly and unreasonably
+disappointed at her absence. An uncontrollable nervousness, as he
+approached his house, invaded the preparation of a warm greeting.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Fanny was seated at dinner, and she interrupted her recognition of his
+arrival to order his soup brought in. "It's really awfully hard to
+have things nice when you come at any time," she said in the voice
+of restraint which usually mildly irritated him. He was apt to reply
+shortly, unsympathetically; but, firm in the determination to improve
+the tone of his relations with Fanny, he cheerfully met the evidence of
+her sense of injury. "Of course," she added, "we expected you yesterday
+up to the very last minute." When he asked her who exactly she meant
+by we she answered, "The Rodmans and John and Alice Luce. It was all
+arranged for you. Borden Rodman sent us some ducks; I remembered how you
+liked them, and I asked the others and cooked them myself. That's mixed,
+but you know what I mean. I had oysters and the thick tomato soup with
+crusts and Brussels sprouts; and I sent to town for the alligator pears
+and meringue. I suppose it can't be helped, and it's all over now, but
+you might have let me know."
+
+"I am sorry, Fanny," he acknowledged; "at the last so much piled up to
+do. Mina Raff was very doubtful. I can't tell if I accomplished anything
+with her or not." Fanny seemed to have lost all interest in Peyton
+Morris's affair. "I had dinner with Mina and talked a long while. At
+bottom she is sensible enough; and very sensitive. I like sensitive
+women."
+
+"You mean that you like other women to be sensitive," she corrected him;
+"whenever I am, you get impatient and say I'm looking for trouble."
+
+There was, he replied, a great deal in what she said; and it must be
+remedied. At this she gazed at him for a speculative second. "Where
+did you take Mina Raff to dinner?" she asked; "and what did you do
+afterward?" He told her. "She was so tired that she went back to the
+Plaza before ten. No, I returned to the Groves'. It's no good being in
+New York alone. We'll have our party together there before Christmas."
+
+"I imagined you'd see a lot of her."
+
+"Of Mina Raff? What nonsense! She is working all day and practically
+never goes out. People have such wrong ideas about actresses, or
+else they have changed and the opinions have stood still. They are
+as business-like now as lawyers; you make an appointment with their
+secretaries. Besides that, Mina doesn't specially attract me."
+
+"At any rate you call her Mina."
+
+"Why so I do; I hadn't noticed; but she hasn't started to call me Lee; I
+must correct her."
+
+"They played bridge afterward," Fanny said, referring, he gathered, to
+the occasion he had missed. "That is, the Rodmans and the Luces did,
+and I sat around. People are too selfish for anything!" Her voice
+grew sharper. "They stayed until after twelve, just because Borden was
+nineteen dollars back at one time. And they drank all that was left of
+your special Mount Vernon. It was last night that you were at the St.
+Regis?"
+
+"No," he corrected her, "the night before. Last evening I had dinner
+with the Groves." This was so nearly true that he advanced it with
+satisfaction. "Afterward we went to the Greenwich Follies."
+
+"I don't see how you had to wait, then," she observed instantly. "You
+were in New York on account of Claire, you stayed three nights, and only
+saw Mina Raff once." He told her briefly that, unexpectedly, more had
+turned up. "What did you do the first night?" she persisted.
+
+"I dragged a cash girl into an opium place on Pell Street."
+
+"That's not too funny to be borne," she returned; "and it doesn't
+altogether answer my question."
+
+"We went to Malmaison."
+
+"We?" she mimicked his earlier query.
+
+"Oh, the Groves. I like them very much, Fanny--" To her interruption
+that that was evident he paid no attention. "He is an extremely nice
+man, a little too conscious of his pedestal, but solid and cordial.
+Mrs. Grove is more unusual; I should say she was a difficult woman to
+describe. She dresses beautifully, Paris and the rest of it; but she
+isn't a particle good-looking. Not a bit! It's her color, I think. She
+hasn't any. Women would fancy her more than men; no one could call her
+pleasant."
+
+"You haven't asked about the children." She had apparently heard nothing
+of what had gone before.
+
+"Of course they are all right or you'd have told me."
+
+"Lee, you astonish me, you really do; at times I think you forget you
+have a family. We'll all be dead before you know it. I'm sorry, but you
+will have to get into the habit of staying home at least one night a
+week. I attend to all I can manage about the place, but there are some
+things you must settle. The trouble is I haven't demanded enough from
+you."
+
+"That's silly," he responded, almost falling into his discarded
+irritation; "I practically never go out without you. Unless you are with
+me I won't be in New York again for weeks."
+
+"I should have thought you'd be back at the Groves's tomorrow. It's more
+amusing there, I don't doubt; but, after all, you are married to me."
+
+"Good heavens, Fanny," he protested, "what is this about? You're really
+cutting with the Groves--two excessively nice people who were decent to
+me."
+
+"You are such an idiot," she declared, in a warmer voice. "Can't you see
+how disappointed I was? First I had everything laid out on the bed, my
+best nightgowns and lace stockings, for the trip; then I couldn't go;
+and I arranged the party so carefully for you, Gregory had a practice
+piece ready for you to hear, and--and nothing. I wonder if any other man
+is as selfish as you?'
+
+"Maybe not," he returned peaceably. "What happened was unavoidable. It
+was a social necessity, decided for me. I couldn't just run into the
+house and out again. But there is no need to explain further." He left
+the table, for a cigar, and returned. "You have on a new dress!"
+
+"I ought to be complimented," she admitted, "but I am not; it's only the
+black velvet with the fulness taken out and a new ruffle. Clothes are so
+expensive that I wanted to save. It isn't French, either. Perhaps you'll
+remember that you said the new length didn't become me. No, you're not
+the idiot--I am: I must stop considering and trying to please you at
+every turn. I should have gone in and ordered a new dress; any other
+woman you know would have done that; and, I have no doubt, would have
+told you it was old when it wasn't. I wish I didn't show that I care so
+much and kept you guessing. You'd be much more interested if you weren't
+so sure of me. That seems to me queer--loyalty and affection, and
+racking your brain to make your husband comfortable and happy, don't
+bring you anything. They don't! You'll leave at once for a night in New
+York or a new face with an impudent bang at the dances. I have always
+tried to do what I thought was right, but I'm getting discouraged."
+
+"Don't lose patience with me," he begged gravely. "If I am worth the
+effort to you, Fanny, don't stop. I do the best I can. Coming out in the
+train I made up my mind to stop petty quarreling. No, wait--if it is my
+fault that makes it easy, we're done with it."
+
+"From the way you talk," she objected, "anyone would think we did
+nothing but fight. And that isn't true; we have never had a bit of
+serious trouble." She rose, coming around to him:
+
+"That wasn't a very nice kiss we had when you came in. I was horrid."
+
+Lee Randon kissed her again. The cool familiarity of her lips was
+blurred in the remembered clinging intensity of Savina's mouth. "Lee,
+dear, blow out the candles; the servants forget, and those blue handmade
+ones cost twenty-five cents apiece." They left the dining-room with
+her arm about him and his hand laid on her shoulder. Lee's feeling was
+curious--he recognized Fanny's desirability, he loved her beyond all
+doubt, and yet physically she had now no perceptible influence on him.
+He was even a little embarrassed, awkward, at her embrace; and its
+calmly possessive pressure filled him with a restive wish to move away.
+He repressed this, forced himself to hold her still, repeated silently
+all that she had given him; and she turned a face brilliant with color
+to his gaze. Fanny made him bring her stool--how sharply Savina's heels
+had dug into him under the table at the Lafayette--and showed him her
+ankles. "You see, I put them on tonight for you." Her stockings, he
+assured her, were enchanting. A difficulty that, incredibly, he had
+not foreseen weighed upon him: the body, where Fanny was concerned, had
+given place to the intellect; the warmth of his feeling had been put
+aside for the logic of determination; and he was sick with weariness. In
+his customary chair, he sank into a heavy brooding lethargy, a silence,
+in which his hands slowly and stiffly clenched.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+On the following morning, Sunday, Lee rode with Claire Morris. Fanny,
+disinclined to activity, stayed by the open fire, with the illustrated
+sections of the newspapers and her ornamental sewing. Claire was on,
+a tall bright bay always a little ahead of Lee, and he was constantly
+urging his horse forward. "Peyton went to the Green Spring Valley for a
+hunt party last night," she told him; "he said he'd be back." Why,
+then, he almost exclaimed, he, Lee, had been successful with Mina Raff.
+Instead he said that she would undoubtedly be glad of that. "Oh, yes!
+But neither of us is very much excited about it just now; he is too much
+like a ball on a rubber string; and if I were a man I'd hate to resemble
+that. I won't try to hide from you that I've lost something; still, I
+have him and Mina hasn't. They shouldn't have hesitated, Lee; that was
+what spoiled it, in the end beat them. It wasn't strong enough to carry
+them away and damn the consequences. There is always something to admire
+in that, even if you suffer from it."
+
+The night had been warm, and the road, the footing, was treacherous with
+loosened stones and mud. The horses, mounting a hill, picked their way
+carefully; and Lee Randon gazed over his shoulder into the valley below.
+He saw it through a screen of bare wet maple branches--a dripping brown
+meadow lightly wreathed in blue mist, sedgy undergrowth along water
+and the further ranges of hills merged in shifting clouds. A shaft of
+sunlight, pale and without warmth, illuminated with its emphasis an
+undistinguished and barren spot. On the meadows sloping to the south
+there were indefinite spaces of green. Claire was heedless of their
+surroundings.
+
+"What does surprise and disturb me," she continued vigorously, "is that
+I haven't any sympathy for him. That is gone too; I only have a feeling
+that he bitched it. As you may observe, Lee, I am not at all admirable
+this morning: a figure of inconsistency. And the reason will amaze
+you--I've rather come to envy what they might have had. I am afraid that
+if the positions of Mina and me had been reversed I wouldn't have seen
+you in New York. I found that out last night when I knew Peyton wasn't
+going. What he said over and over was that everything could be just
+as it was." She laughed, riding easily, subconsciously, on the snaffle
+rein. "Peyton's simplicity is marvelous. In a year, or maybe less, he
+will be quite the same as always. I had nothing to do with it; Peyton
+and Mina will go on as fresh as daisies; yet only I'll be damaged or,
+anyway, changed. What shall I do about it?" she demanded of Lee Randon,
+so sharply that her horse shied.
+
+"About what?" he returned. "My senses are so dulled by your ingratitude
+that I can't gather what you mean."
+
+"Well, here I am--a girl with her head turned by a glimpse at a most
+romantic play, by cakes and champagne cup, and then sent home to bread
+without jam. Since I've known of this it has taken most of the color out
+of everyday things, they are like a tub-full of limp rags with the dye
+run from them. I want Peyton, yes, I love him; but what I thought would
+satisfy me doesn't. I want more! I am very serious about the romantic
+play--it is exactly what I mean. I had read about great emotions, seen
+them since I was a child at the opera, and there was the Madrid affair;
+but that was so far away, and I never thought of the others as real;
+I never understood that people really had them, in Eastlake as well as
+Spain, until I watched Peyton miss his. And then it came over me in a
+flash what life could be."
+
+"We are all in the same fix, Claire," he told her.
+
+"But not you," she replied impatiently; "your existence with Fanny is
+the most perfect for miles around. Fanny is marvelous to you, and you
+are as sensible as you are nice."
+
+"You think, then, that I haven't seen any of this romantic show you are
+talking about?"
+
+"If you had you wouldn't let it spoil your comfort."
+
+The pig again!
+
+"Well, what is it here or there?" she cried. "I'll feel like this for a
+little and then die alive. Did you ever notice an old woman, Lee? She
+is like a horrid joke. There is something unconquerably vain and foolish
+about old men that manages to save them from entire ruin. But a woman
+shrivelled and blasted and twisted out of her purpose--they either look
+as though they had been steeped in vinegar or filled with tallow--is
+simply obscene. Before it is too harrowing, and in their best dresses
+and flowers, they ought to step into a ball-room of chloroform. But this
+change in me, Lee, isn't in my own imagination. The people who know me
+best have complained that what patience I had has gone; even Ira, I'm
+certain, notices it. I have no success in what used to do to get along
+with; my rattle of talk, my line, is gone."
+
+"Those relations of Mina Raff's, the Groves," he said, shifting the
+talk to the subject of his thoughts, "are very engaging. Mrs. Grove
+specially. She has splendid qualities almost never found together in one
+person. She is, well, I suppose careful is the word, and, at the same
+time, not at all dull. I wonder if she is altogether well? Her paleness
+would spoil most women's looks and, it seems to me, she mentioned her
+heart."
+
+"Good Lord, Lee, what are you rambling on about? I don't care for a
+description of the woman like one of those anatomical zodiacs in the
+Farmers' Almanac." She turned her horse, without warning, through a
+break in the fence; and, putting him at a smart run, jumped a stream
+with a high insecure bank beyond, and went with a pounding rush up a
+sharp incline. He followed, but more conservatively; and, at the solid
+fence she next took, he shouted that she'd have to continue on that gait
+alone.
+
+"Don't be so careful," she answered mockingly, trotting back; "take
+a chance; feel the wind streaming in your face; you'll reach Fanny
+safely."
+
+What, exasperated, he muttered was, "Damn Fanny!" He had jumped a fence
+as high and wide as respectability; and he enormously preferred Savina's
+sort of courage to this mad galloping over the country. What Claire
+and Peyton and Mina Raff talked about, longed for, Savina took. He
+involuntarily shut his eyes, and, rocking to the motion of his horse,
+heard, in the darkness, a soft settling fall, he saw an indefinite trace
+of whiteness which swelled into an incandescence that consumed him. They
+had turned toward home and, on an unavoidable reach of concrete road,
+were walking. The horses' hoofs made a rhythmic hollow clatter. Claire,
+with the prospect of losing her love, had hinted at the possibilities
+of an inherited recklessness; but here was a new and unexpected cause of
+disturbance.
+
+Lee would never have supposed that such ideas were at the back of
+Claire's head. He gazed at her, in spite of the fact that she had
+ruffled his temper, even with an increased interest. In her direct way
+she had put into words many of the vague pressures floating, like water
+under night, through his brain. He would act differently; Claire wasn't
+practical--all that she indicated couldn't be followed. It was spun
+of nothing more substantial than the bright visions of youth; but the
+world, he, Lee Randon, was the poorer for that. His was the wise course.
+It took a marked degree of strength; no weak determination could hope
+for success in the conduct he had planned for himself; and that gave him
+material for satisfaction.
+
+He turned to the left, at the road leading past his driveway, and Claire
+went up the hill into Eastlake alone. She had thought he was describing
+Savina for her benefit! The truth was that he had been possessed by a
+tyrannical necessity to talk about Savina Grove, to hear the sound of
+her praise if it were only on his own voice. It assisted his memory,
+created, like the faintly heard echo of a thrilling voice, a similitude
+not without its power to stir him. The secret realms of thought, of
+fancy and remembrance, he felt, were his to linger in, to indulge, as he
+chose. Lee had a doubt of the advisability of this; but his question
+was disposed of by the realization that he had nothing to say; his mind
+turned back and back to Savina.
+
+He wondered when, or, rather, by what means, he should hear from her
+again; perhaps--although it required no reply--in response to the letter
+he had written to the Groves acknowledging their kindness and thanking
+them for it. To Lee, William Loyd Grove was more immaterial than a final
+shred of mist lifting from the sunken road across the golf course; even
+his appreciation of the other's good qualities had vanished, leaving
+nothing at all. He was confused by the ease with which the real, the
+solid, became the nebulous and unreal, as though the only standard of
+values, of weights and measures, lay absurdly in his own inconsequential
+attitude.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The Randons had no formal meal on Sunday night; but there were
+sandwiches, a bowl of salad, coffee, and what else were referred to
+generally as drinks; and a number of people never failed to appear. It
+was always an occasion of mingled conversations, bursts of popular song
+at the piano, and impromptu dancing through the length of the lower
+floor. The benches at either side of the fire-place were invariably
+crowded; and, from her place on the over-mantel, Cytherea's gaze rested
+on the vivacious or subdued current of life. Lee Randon often gazed up
+at her, and tonight, sunk in a corner with scarcely room to move the
+hand which held a cigarette, this lifted interrogation was prolonged.
+
+Mrs. Craddock, whom he had not seen since the dinner-dance at the club,
+sat beside him in a vivid green dress with large black beads strung
+from her left shoulder. She looked very well, he reflected; that was a
+becoming dimple in her cheek. He had had the beginning of an interest in
+her--new to Eastlake, and her husband dead, she had taken a house there
+for the winter--but that had vanished now. He was deep in thought when
+she said:
+
+"Didn't I hear that you were infatuated with that doll?"
+
+Who, he demanded, had told her such a strange story? "But she does
+attract me," he admitted; "or, rather, she raises a great many
+questions, natural in a person named Cytherea. The pair of castanets
+on a nail--Claire used them in an Andalusian dance--might almost be an
+offering, like the crutches of Lourdes, left before her by a grateful
+child of the ballet."
+
+"I can't see what you do, of course; but she reminds me of quantities
+of women--fascinating on the outside and nothing within. Men are always
+being fooled by that: they see a face or hear a voice that starts
+something or other going in them, and they supply a complete personality
+just as they prefer it, like the filling of a paté case. That is what
+you have done with this doll--imagined a lot of things that don't
+exist."
+
+"If they do in me, that's enough, isn't it?" he demanded. "You're partly
+wrong, at any rate--Cytherea is the originator and I'm the paté. But
+where, certainly, you are right is that she is only a representation;
+and it is what she may represent which holds me. Cytherea, if she would,
+could answer the most important question of my life."
+
+"How tragic that she can't speak."
+
+"Yet that isn't necessary; she might be a guide, like a pointing
+finger-post. I met a woman lately, as charming as possible, who
+resembled her; and I'm sure that if I had them together--" he left the
+end of his sentence in air. Then he began again, "But that could not be
+managed; not much can, with advantage, in this world." From beyond the
+hall, to the accompaniment of the piano, came the words, "She might
+have been a mother if she hadn't looped the loop." Lee made a disdainful
+gesture. "That is the tone of the present--anything is acceptable if it
+is trivial; you may kiss wherever you like if you mean nothing by it.
+But if it's important, say like--like sympathy, it's made impossible for
+you."
+
+"If you were someone else," Mrs. Craddock observed, "I'd think you were
+in love. You have a great many of the symptoms--the wandering eye and
+wild speech."
+
+"I am, with Fanny," he declaimed, struggling out of the bench corner.
+No one should discover the memory he carried everywhere with him.
+The lights had been switched off in the living-room, but the piano
+continued, and glowing cigarettes, like red and erratically waving
+signals, were visible. Returning, going into the dining-room, he saw
+that the whiskey had been plentifully spilled over the table. In the
+morning the varnish would be marred by white stains. The stairs were
+occupied, the angle in the hall behind which a door gave to the cellar
+steps, was filled; a sound, not culinary, came from the kitchen pantry.
+Even Fanny, with her hair in disorder, was dancing an eccentric step
+with Borden Rodman. All this vibrating emotion created in him, sudden
+and piercing, a desire for Savina.
+
+He wanted her, the touch of her magnetic hands, her clinging body, her
+passionate abandon, with every sense. It was unbearable that she, too,
+wasn't here, waiting for him in the convenient darkness. He had to have
+her, he muttered. At the same time he was appalled by the force of his
+feeling: it shook him like a chill and gripped his heart with an acute
+pain. His entire being was saturated with a longing that was at once
+a mental and physical disturbance. Nothing in his life, no throe of
+passion or gratification, had been like this. Lee hastily poured out a
+drink and swallowed it. He was burning up, he thought; it felt as though
+a furnace were open at his back; and he went out to the silence, the
+coldness, of the terrace flagging on the lawn. The lower window shades
+had been pulled down, but, except in the dining-room, they showed no
+blur of brightness. Through the walls the chords of the piano were just
+audible, and the volume of voices was reduced to a formless humming.
+
+It had cleared, the sky was glittering with constellations of stars;
+against them Lee could trace the course of his telephone wire. But for
+that his house, taking an added dignity of mass from the night, might
+have been the reality of which it was no more than an admirable replica.
+There was little here, outside, to suggest or recall the passage of a
+century and over. In the lapse of that time, Lee thought, more had been
+lost than gained; the simplicity had vanished, but wisdom had not been
+the price of its going.
+
+Of all the people at present in his dwelling, Fanny was the best in
+the sense of old solid things; he could see her, with no change, at
+the board of an early household. Compared to her the others seemed like
+figures in a fever; yet he was, unhappily, with them rather than with
+Fanny. God knew there was fever enough in his brain! But the winter
+night was cooling it--a minor image of the final office of death; the
+choking hunger for Savina was dwindling. He hoped that it wouldn't be
+repeated. He couldn't answer for himself through many such attacks. Yes,
+his first love, though just as imperative, had been more ecstatic; the
+reaching for an ideal rather than the body of a woman.
+
+His allegiance to Cytherea, though, was in part to the former, to youth;
+now it seemed to him he had preserved that through all his life. But the
+latter, at least in its devastating power, was new. Lee recognized it
+as passion, but passion to a degree beyond all former experience and
+comprehension. Why had it been quiescent so long to overwhelm him now?
+Or what had he done to open himself to such an invasion? A numbing
+poison couldn't have been very different. Then, contrarily, he was
+exhilarated by the knowledge of the vitality of his emotion; Lee
+reconsidered it with an amazement which resembled pride.
+
+The penny kisses here--he was letting himself into the house--were like
+the candies Fanny had in a crystal dish on the sideboard, flavors of
+cinnamon and rose and sugary chocolate. They were hardly more than the
+fumes of alcohol. But the party showed no signs of ending, the piano
+continued to be played without a break; one sentimental song had been
+repeated, without the omission of a line, a held note, ten times, Lee
+was sure. Fanny paused breathlessly, with a hand on his arm:
+
+"They are all having such a good time; it is absolutely successful.
+Isn't Borden sweet to bother teaching me that heel tap. Go in and talk
+to Mrs. Craddock again; I thought you liked her."
+
+In the hall the victrola had been started in opposition to the piano
+beyond, and the result was a pandemonium of mechanical sound and
+hysterical laughter. Cytherea was unmoved, enigmatic, fascinating; the
+gilt of her headdress shone in minute sparkles--Lee had turned on the
+lights by the mantel. "You always come back to her," Mrs. Craddock said.
+When he replied that this time he had returned to her, she shook her
+head sceptically. "But I suppose you have to say it." He dropped back
+into a corner of one of the benches; they were a jumble of skirts and
+reclining heads and elevated pumps. The victrola, at the end of a
+record and unattended, ran on with a shrill scratch. Cytherea had the
+appearance of floating in the restrained light; her smile was not now so
+mocking as it was satirical; from her detached attention she might have
+been regarding an extraordinary and unpredictable spectacle which she
+had indifferently brought about. It was evident that among what virtues
+she might possess charity was not present.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+After the last automobile leaving--shifted through the diminishing
+clamor of its gears--had carried its illumination into the farther
+obscurity of the road, Fanny, uncomfortable in the presence of disorder,
+quickly obliterated the remaining traces of their party: she emptied the
+widely scattered ash trays into a brass bowl, gathered the tall whiskey
+glasses and the glasses with fragile stems and brilliantly enamelled
+belligerent roosters, the empty charged water bottles, on the dresser in
+the pantry, and returned chairs and flowers to their recognized places,
+while Lee locked up the decanters of whiskey. Fanny was tired but
+enthusiastic, and, as she went deftly about, rearranging her house with
+an unfailing surety of touch, she hummed fragments of the evening's
+songs.
+
+Lee Randon was weary without any qualification; the past day,
+tomorrow--but it was already today--offered him no more than a burden,
+so many heavy hours, to be supported. The last particle of interest had
+silently gone from his existence. His condition was entirely different
+from the mental disquiet of a month ago; no philosophical considerations
+nor abstract ideas absorbed him now--it was a weariness not of the mind
+but of the spirit, a complete sterility of imagination and incentive,
+as though an announced and coveted prize had been arbitrarily withdrawn
+during the struggle it was to have rewarded. There was no reason Lee
+could think of for keeping up his diverse efforts. He sat laxly in his
+customary corner of the living room--Fanny, he felt, had disposed of
+him there as she had the other surrounding objects--his legs thrust out
+before him, too negative to smoke.
+
+His wife leaned over and kissed him; she was, she had suddenly
+discovered, dead with fatigue. The kiss was no more than the contact of
+her lips on his. The clear realization of this startled him; now not
+an emotion, not even tenderness, responded to her gestures of love. His
+indifference had been absolute! There had been periods of short duration
+when, exasperated with Fanny, he had lost the consciousness of his
+affection for her; but then he had been filled with other stirred
+emotions; and now he was coldly empty of feeling. It was this vacancy
+that specially disturbed him: it had an appearance, new to all his
+processes, of permanence.
+
+Outside his will the fact was pronounced for him that--for a long or
+short period--he had ceased to love his wife. There was something so
+intimately and conventionally discourteous in his realization that he
+avoided it even in his thoughts. But it would not be ignored; it was too
+robust a truth to be suppressed by weakened instincts. He didn't love
+Fanny and Fanny did love him ... a condition, he felt indignantly, which
+should be automatically provided against; none of the ethics of decency
+or conduct provided for that. It wasn't for a second, without the
+single, the familiar and ancient, cause, allowed. Fanny, least of any
+imaginable woman, had given him a pretext for complaint. Yet, with
+everyone acknowledging her to be the perfect wife, and he at the fore
+of such praise, he had incontestably stopped caring for her. It was a
+detestable situation.
+
+In the whole body of preconceived thought and action there wasn't a
+word, a possible movement, left for him. He was, simply, a hyena; that
+description, not innocent of humor, was still strikingly close to what
+he would generally hear if the state of his mind were known. It was
+paralyzing, but absolutely no provision had been made for men, decent
+enough, who had stopped loving decent wives. Lee was not, here,
+considering the part of his life involved with Savina Grove: Savina had
+nothing to do with his attitude toward Fanny. This didn't hang on the
+affection he might have for one at the superficial expense of the other:
+Savina--while it was undeniable that she had done exactly this in the
+vulgar physical sense--hadn't essentially taken him away from Fanny.
+He had gone self-directed, or, rather, in the blind manner of an object
+obeying the law of gravity. He couldn't argue that he had been swept
+away.
+
+It wasn't, either, that he overwhelmingly wanted to go to Savina Grove,
+he overwhelmingly didn't; and the strangling emotion, the desire,
+that had possessed him earlier in the evening had been sufficiently
+unwelcome. His only reaction to that was the vigorous hope that it
+wouldn't come back. No, he had, mentally, settled the affair with Savina
+in the best possible manner; now he was strictly concerned with the
+bond between his wife and himself. The most reliable advice,
+self-administered or obtained from without, he could hope for would
+demand that he devote the rest of his life, delicately considerate, to
+Fanny. She must never know the truth. This was the crown of a present
+conception of necessity and unassailable conduct, of nobility. But,
+against this, Lee Randon was obliged to admit that he was not a particle
+noble; he wasn't certain that he wanted to be; he suspected it. Putting
+aside, for the moment, the doubtfulness of his being able to maintain
+successfully, through years, such an imposition, there was something
+dark, equally dubious, in its performance. He might manage it publicly,
+even superficially in private, and as a father; but marriage wasn't
+primarily a superficial relationship. It was very much the reverse.
+Its fundamental condition was the profoundest instinct that controlled
+living; there no merely admirable conduct could manage to be more than
+a false and degrading, a temporary, lie. How could he with a pandering
+smugness meet Fanny's purity of feeling? Yet, it seemed, exactly this
+was being done by countless other applauded men. But, probably, the
+difference between them and himself was that they had no objective
+consciousness of their course; happily they never stopped to think. It
+was thought, he began to see, and not feeling that created nearly all
+his difficulties.
+
+In a flash of perception he grasped that formal thought, in its aspect
+of right conduct, was utterly opposed to feeling. While the former
+condemned the surrender of Savina and himself to passion, the latter,
+making it imperative, had brushed aside the barriers of recognized
+morals. It had been a tragic, it might well be a fatal, error to oppose
+religion--as it affected both this world and the impossible next--to
+nature.
+
+Yet men could no longer exist as animals; he saw that plainly. They
+had surrendered the natural in favor of an artificial purity. In a land
+where sea shells were the standard of value, rubies and soft gold were
+worthless. Lee was opposed to his entire world; he had nothing but his
+questioning, his infinitesimal entity, for his assistance. Literally
+there wasn't a man to whom he could turn whose answer and advice weren't
+as predictable as useless. There was nothing for him but to accept his
+position and, discharging it where he was able, fail where he must.
+
+There was, however, no need for that failure to be absolute; and the
+underlying responsibility he had fully considered, subject to its own
+attained code, would have to do service as best it could. Here he paused
+to realize that the improved manners he had determined on were no more
+than the expression of his growing, his grown, indifference. It should
+be easy to be restrained in a situation that had small meaning or
+importance. What struck him again was the fact that his connection with
+Fanny was of far greater moment than that with Helena and Gregory.
+His responsibility to them was a minor affair compared to the weight
+increasingly laid upon their elders. Somehow, they didn't seem to need
+him as sharply as Fanny did. Materially they were all three more
+than sufficiently provided for, and spiritually, as he had so often
+reflected, he had little or no part in his children's well-being.
+Perhaps this, he had told himself, could be changed; certainly he was
+solely to blame if he had stood aside from their education.
+
+He would see more of them--four days a week were now plenty for the
+conducting of his successful enterprises in the city--and give them
+what benefits his affection and experience held. In this he mustn't
+contradict the influence of their mother; that, so late, would only be
+followed by chaos; he'd merely be more with them. Helena was old enough
+for a small tractable horse and Gregory must have a pony. All four,
+Fanny and he and the children, would jog out in the spring together.
+From that mental picture he got a measure of reassurance; a condition
+resembling peace of mind again returned. As much as possible, against
+the elements of danger, was in his favor. He might have had a wife
+who, on the prevalent tide of gin and orange juice, of inordinate
+luxuriousness, degraded him with small betrayals. Or he might have been
+any one of a hundred unfortunate things. He took life too seriously,
+that was evident; a larger degree of mental irresponsibility would be
+followed by a more responsible accomplishment of the realities which
+bore no more heavily on him than on other men; and in this the cocktails
+had their office.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Lee agreed readily, therefore, when, on Friday afternoon, Fanny asked
+him to bring Helena and Gregory from dancing-school. This was held in
+the Armory; and, past five o'clock, mounting the wide stone steps in
+the early gloom and going through the bare echoing hall, he joined the
+complacent mothers ranged in chairs pushed against the wall in a spirit
+of interested attention. The Armory, following the general literal
+interpretation of the sternness of military usage, was gaunt, with a
+wide yellow floor and walls of unconcealed brick. In a far corner, on a
+temporary and unpainted platform, the pianist sat with her hands raised,
+her wrists rigid, preparatory to the next demand upon her strongly
+accentuated playing. Lee was surprised at the large number of children
+ranged in an irregular ring about the erect brittle presence and
+insistent voice of the instructor.
+
+What scant hair he possessed, carefully disposed to cover its
+meagreness, was grey, and its color permeated, suggested, the tone of
+his thin face. Surrounded by the cruel exuberance of the children,
+he seemed incalculably worn, permanently weary, although he
+was surprisingly sharp-eyed and adequate. It was, Lee thought
+unsympathetically, a curiously negative occupation for a man; the small
+graces of the dancing teacher, the bows gravely exchanged with childish
+bows, the bent dancing with diminutive slips, the occasional fretful
+tone of his voice, further alienated Lee Randon. But the children were a
+source of entertainment and speculation.
+
+He saw Gregory at once, short and sturdy-legged, in a belted jacket and
+white breeches; his son was standing peaceably, attentive, clasping the
+hand of a girl smaller than himself with obstinate bobbed hair. This,
+the high pointed voice in the center of the floor continued, was an
+Irish folk dance; they would try it again; and the reiterated details
+were followed by the sounding of a whistle and music. Lee had no idea of
+the exact number of children engaged, but he was certain that there were
+just as many totally different executions of the steps before them. Not
+one had grasped an essential of the carefully illustrated instruction;
+he could see nowhere an evidence of grace or rhythm. But, with a few
+notable exceptions, all boys, there was an entire solemnity of effort;
+the swinging of bare short legs, the rapid awkward bobs, were undertaken
+with a deep sense of their importance.
+
+The Irish folk dance was attempted for a third time, and then
+relinquished in favor of a waltz. Miniature couples circled and
+staggered, the girls again prim, the boys stolid or with working mouths,
+or as smooth and vacuous as chestnuts, little sailors and apparitions in
+white, obviously enjoying their employment. During this not a word
+was exchanged; except for the shuffling feet, the piano, an occasional
+phrase of encouragement from the instructor, himself gliding with a dab
+of fat in exaggerated ribbons, there wasn't a sound. To Lee it had the
+appearance of the negation of pleasure; it was, in its way, as bad as
+the determined dancing of adults; it had the look of a travesty of
+that. Helena conducted a restive partner, trying vainly to create the
+impression that he was leading, wherever she considered it advantageous
+for him to go. The thick flood of her gold hair shimmered about her
+uncompromising shoulders, her embroidered skirt fluttered over the
+firmness of her body.
+
+She was as personable a little girl as any present; and, while she
+hadn't Gregory's earnestness in what he attempted, she got on smoothly
+enough. Seeing Lee, she smiled and waved a hand almost negligently; but
+Gregory, at his presence, grew visibly embarrassed; he almost stopped.
+Lee Randon nodded for him to go ahead. There were various minor
+cataclysms--Helena flatly refused to dance with a boy who pursued her
+with an urging hand. At this conspicuous reverse he sat on a chair
+until the teacher brought him forcibly out and precipitated him into the
+willing arms of a girl larger and, if possible, more inelastic than the
+others. The ring was again assembled, and the complicated process of
+alternating a boy with a girl was accomplished.
+
+"Never mind what he does," the instructor directed sharply; "always be
+sure you are right." A shift was made further around in the line, and
+the elder wisdom was vindicated. "Now, the chain." The whistle blew.
+"Left and right, left and right." In spite of this there was an equal
+engagement of rights with lefts. The assumption of gravity acutely
+bothered Lee Randon: they had no business, he thought, to be already
+such social animals. Their training in set forms, mechanical gestures
+and ideas, was too soon hardening their mobility and instinctive
+independence. Yes, they were a caricature of what they were to become.
+He hadn't more sympathy with what he had resolved to encourage, applaud,
+but less. The task of making any headway against that schooling was
+beyond him.
+
+The dancing reached a pause, and, with it, the silence: a confusion of
+clear undiversified voices rose: the face of an infant with long belled
+trousers and solidified hair took on a gleam of impish humor; older and
+more robust boys scuffled together with half-subdued hails and large
+pretentions; groups of girls settled their skirts and brushed, with
+instinctive pats, their braids into order; and there was a murmur of
+exchanged approbation from the supporting, white-gloved mothers. Gregory
+appeared at Lee's side; his cheeks were crimson with health, his serious
+eyes glowed:
+
+"Well, do you like it?"
+
+"Yes," Gregory answered shyly. He lingered while Lee Randon tried to
+think of something else appropriate to say, and then he ran abruptly
+off. His children were affectionate enough, but they took him absolutely
+for granted; they regarded him very much as they did their cat; except
+for the conventional obeisance they made him, not so voluntary as it was
+trained into them, they were far more involved with Martha, their black
+nurse. Everywhere, Lee felt, they repelled him. Was he, then, lacking in
+the qualities, the warmth, of paternity? Again, as he was helpless where
+Fanny lately was concerned, he was unable to be other.
+
+It was increasingly evident that he had not been absorbed, obliterated,
+in marriage; an institution which, from the beginning, had tried--like
+religion--to hold within its narrow walls the unconfinable instincts of
+creation. It hadn't, among other things, considered the fascination of
+Cytherea; a name, a tag, as intelligible as any for all his dissent. But
+cases like his were growing more prevalent; however, usually, in women.
+Men were the last stronghold of sentimentality. His thoughts were
+interrupted by a dramatic rift in the discipline of the class: a boy,
+stubbornly seated, swollen, crimson, with wrath and heroically withheld
+tears, was being vainly argued with by the dancing master. He wouldn't
+stir, he wouldn't dance. The man, grasping a shoulder, shook him in a
+short violence, and then issued a final uncompromising order.
+
+The boy rose and, marching with an increasing rapidity toward the
+entrance, he struck aside a placid and justifiably injured child,
+dragged open the door, and slammed it after him with a prodigious and
+long echoing report. His contempt, holding its proportion in the reduced
+propriety of the occasion, was like a clap of communistic thunder in an
+ultra-conservative assembly. For a moment, together with all the others,
+Lee Randon was outraged; then, with a suppression of his unorderly
+amusement, he had a far different conception--he saw himself, for no
+easily established reason, in the person of the rebel who had left
+behind him the loud announcement of his angry dissent. Helena sought Lee
+immediately.
+
+"That's his mother," she said in a penetrating whisper, indicating a
+woman with a resolutely abstracted expression and constrained hands.
+The children were gathered finally and formed into a line which, to the
+drumming piano, moved and halted, divided and subdivided. Led by the
+instructor it was involved in an apparently issueless tangle and then
+straightened smoothly out. The dancing class at an end, Helena and
+Gregory, wedged into the seat with Lee in the car, swept into an eager
+chatter, a rush of questions, that he was unable to follow. A Sara Lane
+was announced by Helena to be the object of Gregory's affection, and
+Gregory smugly admitted this to be true. He was going to marry her, he
+declared further.
+
+"Perhaps," Lee suggested, "you'll change your mind."
+
+"Why, Gregory has four girls," Helena instructed him.
+
+"Well," Gregory retorted, "I can marry them all."
+
+But what, under this reflected chatter, was his son like? What would
+he be? And Helena! They eluded him like bright and featureless bits of
+glass. His effort to draw closer to them was proving a failure; what
+could he give them safer than their attachment to the imponderable body
+of public opinion and approval? He had nothing but doubts, unanswerable
+questions; and a mental, a moral, isolation. It was easier to remain
+in the dancing class than to be sent out in an agony of revolt and
+strangling shame.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Often, during his conversations with Fanny, she returned to the subject
+of his late New York trip and stay with the Groves. She asked small
+interested questions, commented on the lavish running of the Grove
+house; she couldn't, she explained, get nectarines and Belgian grapes in
+Eastlake; but when she was in the city again she'd bring some out. "Mina
+Raff's limousine sounds luxurious," she acknowledged. But Fanny wasn't
+curious about Mina; after the first queries she accepted her placidly;
+now that she had withdrawn from the Morrises' lives, Fanny regarded her
+in the light of a past episode that cast them all together on a romantic
+screen. What mostly she asked touched upon Savina Grove. "Did they seem
+happy?" she inquired about the Groves. He replied:
+
+"Very. William Grove was quite affectionate when he left for
+Washington."
+
+A momentary and ominous suspense followed a sudden stopping of his
+voice.
+
+"You didn't say anything about that before," she observed carefully.
+"When did he go, how long was he away?" She put aside what she was
+doing, waiting.
+
+"He left unexpectedly; just when I forget; but during the last day I was
+there."
+
+"Lee, why didn't you say that Mr. Grove had gone to Washington? It seems
+very peculiar."
+
+"I told you it had slipped my mind," he retorted, striving, in a
+level tone, to hide his chagrin and an increasing irritation at her
+persistence.
+
+"When did he come back?"
+
+"I don't know." Suddenly he gave way to a complete frankness. "He may
+not be back yet."
+
+"Then you had dinner at the restaurant and went to the theatre alone
+with her."
+
+"If it's possible to be alone with anyone, you are correct. What, in the
+name of heaven, are you getting at?"
+
+"Only this--that, for some reason I can't gather, you lied to me. I have
+had the most uncomfortable impression about her all along. Why?" Her
+demand had a quality of unsteady emotion. "I have been so close to you,
+Lee, we have had each other so completely, that I have feelings I can't
+account for. I always know when--when you've been a little silly; there
+is something in your eyes; but I have never felt like this before. Lee,"
+she leaned suddenly forward, her hands clasping the sides of her chair,
+"you must be absolutely truthful with me, it's the only way I can live.
+I love you so much; you're all I have; I don't care for anyone else now.
+You have taken me away from my family; you are my family. Ours isn't an
+ordinary marriage, like the Lucians', but worlds deeper."
+
+Yet, he told himself, in spite of her assurances the truth would ruin
+them; besides, as he had recognized, it didn't belong exclusively to
+him; it was, as well, Savina's truth. At any cost he had to protect
+her. Lee replied by saying that it was useless to tell her facts in
+her present unreasonable humor. "Why didn't you tell me he had gone
+to Washington?" she repeated; her tone had a sharper edge. "Was there
+anything you needed to hide?" Just what, he demanded, did she suspect?
+Fanny didn't know.
+
+"Only I have had this worrying feeling. Did you go straight back from
+the theatre or take a drive?" He was amazed at her searching prescient
+questions; but his manner was admirable.
+
+"New Yorkers are not very apt to drive around their Park at night. They
+are rather familiar with it. There's the afternoon for that, and the
+morning for the bridle paths. I won't go on, though, in such a senseless
+and positively insulting conversation."
+
+"You are not yourself since you returned," she observed acutely. "Sunday
+night you were too queer for words. You couldn't talk to Mrs. Craddock
+for more than a minute at a time. Did you call her Savina?" Mrs.
+Craddock's name, he responded in a nicely interrogating manner, he
+had thought to be Laura. She paid no attention to his avoidance of her
+demand. "Did you?"
+
+"No." His self-restraint was fast vanishing.
+
+"I can't believe a word you say."
+
+"Hell, don't ask me then."
+
+"You must not curse where the servants can hear you, and I won't listen
+to such talk, I'll leave the table. I wish you'd look in the mirror and
+see how red and confused you are. It is too bad that I cannot depend on
+you after so long, and with the children. You were sitting close to that
+woman, and--and your arms; you were kissing."
+
+"I have her garter on my bureau."
+
+"Stop." Her anger now raised her above petty sallies. "I have stood
+a great deal from you, but there is more I simply won't. Do you
+understand? I've always done my duty and I'll make you do yours. I never
+have looked at another man, nor been kissed, except that horrid one last
+July at the Golf Club." While she paused, breathless, he put in that it
+might do her good. "Oh, I see," she spoke slowly: "you think that would
+give you an excuse. If I did it I couldn't complain about your nasty
+affairs. How cheap and easy I must seem. You ought to be ashamed to try
+to trick me."
+
+"If you are going to fly at conclusions you can sit in the tree alone,"
+he protested. "It's amazing where you have arrived from nothing. Let me
+tell you that I won't be ragged like this; if you think so much of our
+life why do you make it hideous with these degrading quarrels? You would
+never learn that way if there was the slightest, the slightest, cause
+for your bitterness. You have all you want, haven't you? The house and
+grounds are planted with your flowers, you are bringing up the children
+to be like yourself. I don't specially care for this," he made a
+comprehensive gesture; "building an elaborate place to die in doesn't
+appeal to me. What is so valuable, so necessary, to you, I never think
+of. You are so full of your life that you don't consider mine, except
+where it is tied up with your interests."
+
+"Lee Randon," she cried, "I've given you everything, it's all planned
+for you, here. Nothing comes on the table that you dislike--we haven't
+had beefsteak for months; when you are busy with your papers I keep it
+like a grave; and if the house seems cold, and I can't find Christopher,
+I don't bother you, but slip down to the furnace myself."
+
+"Make me uncomfortable, then," he retorted; "I think that's what I'm
+sick of--your eternal gabbling about comfort and dinner. Let the God
+damn furnace go out! Or burn up."
+
+"That's all I have, Lee," she said helplessly; "it is my life. I tried,
+the last month, to be different, after watching you with gayer women;
+but it only made me miserable; I kept wondering if Gregory was covered
+up and if the car would start when you wanted to go home. But I won't
+be sorry for it." Her head was up, her cheeks blazing. "I know, and
+so ought you, what being good is. And if you forget it you will have a
+dreadful misfortune. God is like that: He'll punish you."
+
+"You don't need help," he commented brutally.
+
+Detached tears rolled over her cheeks. "I won't cry," she contradicted
+the visible act; "I won't. You take such a cowardly advantage of me."
+
+The advantage, he reflected, was entirely on her side. Within, he was
+hard, he had no feeling of sympathy for her; the division between them
+was absolute. With an angry movement she brushed the tears from her
+cheeks. "I hate her," she said viciously; "she is a rotten detestable
+woman."
+
+"On the contrary," he replied, "Mrs. Grove, if you happen to mean her,
+is singularly attractive. There is no smallness about her."
+
+"Hell," she mocked him, "it is really too touching. When shall you see
+her again?"
+
+"Never." At once he saw that he had made a second mistake.
+
+"How sad--never; I can't bear it. You both must have been wretched at
+that long hopeless parting. And she agreed to let you go--back to your
+wife and children." Fanny's voice was a triumph of contempt. "I ought to
+thank her; or be magnanimous and send you back."
+
+"This is all built on a ridiculous assumption," Lee reminded her; "I
+even forget how we started. Suppose we talk about something else;
+Mrs. Grove, as a topic, is pretty well exhausted." Fanny, narrow-eyed,
+relapsed into an intent silence. She faded from his mind, her place
+taken by Savina. Immediately he was conscious of a quickening of his
+blood, the disturbed throb of his heart; the memory of delirious hours
+enveloped him in a feverish mist more real than his wife sitting before
+him with a drawn brow.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Usually after such scenes Fanny had flowered in a tender remorse for
+their bitter remarks, the wasted opportunity of happiness; but again she
+left him coldly, unmelted. He was glad--a show of affection would have
+been unsupportable. But his marriage was becoming precarious; Lee seemed
+to be without power to execute his firm intentions; a conviction
+of insecurity settled over him. The sense of a familiar difficulty
+returned; there was nothing for him to do but order his life on a common
+pattern and face an unrelieved futility of years. He remembered, with a
+grim amusement, the excellent advice he had given Peyton Morris,
+Peyton at the verge of falling from the approved heights into the
+unpredictable. If he had come to him now in that quandary, what
+would he, Lee, have said? Yet all that he had told Peyton he still
+believed--the variety of life lay on the circular moving horizon, there
+was none at hand. But now he comprehended the unmeasurable longing that
+had, for the time, banished every other consideration from the younger
+man. It had upset his heredity, his violent prejudices, and his not
+negligible religion.
+
+Peyton, too, had fallen under the charm of Cytherea; but chance--was it
+fortunate?--had restrained him. Lee had seen Morris the evening before,
+at a dinner with Claire, and he had been silent, abstracted. He had
+scarcely acknowledged Lee Randon's presence. The Morrises had avoided
+him. Still, that was inevitable, since, for them, he was charged with
+unpleasant memories.
+
+He collected in thought all the married people who, he knew, were
+unhappy or dissatisfied: eleven of the eighteen Lee called to mind.
+"What is the matter with it?" he demanded savagely, aloud, in his room.
+He considered marriage--isolated for that purpose--as a social contract,
+the best possible solving of a number of interrelated needs and
+instincts; and, practical and grey, it recommended itself to his reason;
+it successfully disposed of the difficulties of property, the birth and
+education of children, and of society. It was a sane, dignified, way to
+live with a woman; and it secured so much. Undoubtedly, on that count,
+marriage couldn't be bettered. As it was, it satisfied the vast majority
+of men and women: against the bulk of human life Fanny and he, with
+their friends, were inconsiderable. But the number of men who struggled
+above the common level was hardly greater; and he and his opinions were
+of that preferable minority. The freedom of money, the opportunities
+of leisure, always led directly away from what were called the
+indispensable virtues.
+
+Men--he returned to the Eastlake streets on Saturday night--except those
+lost in the monomania of a dream, didn't want to work, they didn't even
+wish to be virtuous. They turned continually to the bypaths of pleasure,
+that self-delusion and forgetfulness of drink. Yes, released from the
+tyrannies of poverty, they flung themselves into a swift spending.
+The poor were more securely married than the rich, the dull than
+the imaginative--married, he meant, in the sense of a forged bond, a
+stockade. This latter condition had been the result of allowing the
+church to interfere unwarrantedly in what was not its affair. Religion
+had calmly usurped this, the most potent of the motives of humanity;
+or, rather, it had fastened to it the ludicrous train of ritual. That
+laughable idea that God had a separate scrutinizing eye, like the eye of
+a parrot, on every human atom!
+
+Lee changed his position, physically and mentally--he was lying in
+bed--and regarded religion in itself. It was, in the hunger for a
+perpetual identity, almost as strong a force as the other passion. But
+were they conspicuously other? They had many resemblances. He didn't, by
+religion, refer to Christianity which, he thought, was but a segregated
+and weakened form of worship. It was, for example, against the Christian
+influence that he was struggling. He meant the sense of profound
+mystery, the revolt against utter causelessness, which had tormented to
+no clearness so many generations of minds. He accepted the fact that
+a formless longing was all that he could ever experience; for him,
+uncritically, that seemed enough; he had willingly relinquished any hope
+of an eternity like a white frosted cake set with twinkling candles. But
+viewed as a tangible force operating here and now, identical--to
+return to his main preoccupation--with love, it demanded some settled
+intelligence of comprehension.
+
+What he wanted, he was drawn bolt upright as if by an inner shout, was
+an assurance that could be depended on, that wouldn't break and break
+and leave him nothing but a feeling of inscrutable mockery. He wanted to
+understand himself, and, in that, Fanny and the children ... and Savina.
+Obviously they were all bound together in one destiny, by a single
+cause. Why had he stopped loving Fanny and had no regret--but a sharp
+gladness--in his adultery with Savina? He discarded the qualifying word
+as soon as it had occurred to him: there was no adultery, adulteration,
+in his act with Savina; it had filled him with an energy, a mental and
+nervous vigor, long denied to the sanctified bed of marriage. He wanted
+not even to be justified, but only an explanation of what he was; and
+he waited, his hands pressed into the softness of the mattress on either
+side of him, as if the salvation of some reply might come into his
+aching brain. Nothing, of course, broke the deep reasonable stillness of
+the night. He slipped back on his pillow weary and baffled.
+
+There, to defraud his misery, he deliberately summoned the memory
+of Savina, and of delirious hours. She came swiftly, with convulsive
+shoulders, fingers drawn down over his body; he heard her little cry,
+"Ah!" How changed her voice had been when she said, "I love you." It had
+had no apparent connection with the moment, their actual passion. It
+had disturbed him with the suggestion of a false, a forced, note. In
+a situation of the utmost accomplishable reality it had been vague,
+meaningless. I love you. It was a strange phrase, at once empty and
+burdened with illimitable possibilities. He had said it times without
+number to Fanny, but first--how seductively virginal she had been--on
+a veranda at night. Then, though not quite for the first time, he had
+kissed her. And suddenly her reserve, her protecting chastity, had gone
+out of her forever.
+
+When had the other, all that eventually led to Savina, begun; when had
+he lost his love? A long process of turning from precisely the orderly
+details which, he had decided, should make marriage safe. He was back
+where he had started--the realization of how men deserted utility for
+visions, at the enigmatic smile of Cytherea. A sterile circle. Some men
+called it heaven, others found hell. His mental searching, surrounded,
+met, by nullity, he regarded as his supreme effort in the direction of
+sheer duty. If whoever had it in command chose to run the world blindly,
+unintelligibly, in a manner that would soon wreck the strongest concern,
+he wasn't going to keep on annoying himself with doubts and the dictates
+of a senseless conscience. What, as soon as possible, he'd do was fall
+asleep.
+
+The crowing of a rooster pierced the thinning night, a second answered
+the first, and they maintained a long self-glorifying, separated duet.
+The wind which had been flowing in at the north window changed to the
+south-west.
+
+The difficulties of his living with Fanny increased the next morning: it
+was one of the week-days when he didn't go into town after breakfast.
+He was dressed for riding, his horse was at the door, when, without
+previous announcement and unprepared, she decided to go with him. He
+could hear her hurrying upstairs--it upset her unreasonably to rush--and
+suddenly, with the audible fall of a boot on the floor, there was the
+unmistakable sound of sobbing.
+
+Lee went up, half impatient and half comprehending, and found her seated
+on a bed, leaning her head in an arm on the foot-board. "Don't wait for
+me," she cried in a smothered voice; "it makes you so nervous. Just go;
+it doesn't matter what I do. You've--you've shown me that. Oh, dear,
+I am so miserable. Everything was right and so happy, and now it's all
+wrong."
+
+"Nonsense," he replied tonically; "it will take Christopher a few
+minutes to get your saddle on. I'll be outside." Mounted and waiting for
+her, his horse stepping contrarily over the grass beyond the drive,
+he didn't care whether she came or stayed. When she appeared her eyes,
+prominent now rather than striking, were reddened, and the hastily
+applied paint and powder were unbecomingly streaked with some late
+irrepressible tears.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+When they had returned, and through lunch and after, a not unfamiliar
+stubborn silence settled over Fanny. When she spoke it was with
+an armor-like sarcasm protecting and covering her feelings. He was
+continually surprised at the correctness of her attitude toward Savina;
+his wife could know nothing; she was even without the legitimate
+foundation of a suspicion; but her bearing had a perceptible frostiness
+of despair. What, he wondered moodily, would next, immediately, develop?
+Something, certainly--Fanny's accumulations of emotion were always
+sharply discharged; they grew in silence but they were expended in edged
+words.
+
+In a way he was glad that he had made the error of speaking about
+William Grove's absence in Washington: it was a step toward a final
+resolution, a tranquilization, of the pressure at home. He didn't know
+what would bring it up, possibly a storm surpassing in violence all that
+had preceded it; and then ... the open prospect of old age. Fanny should
+not actually learn of the occurrence in New York, there must be no
+mistake about that; she would act on the supposition that he had been
+merely indulging in a more or less advanced dallying; but her patience
+in that, he judged, was at an end. Well, he could ultimately, in all
+sincerity, agree with her there. Not too soon, of course, for she was at
+present deeply suspicious of such protestations; he would maintain for
+a short while longer an appearance of annoyance, his old successful
+indignations at her minor charges, and then let her see that she had
+nothing left to combat from that quarter.
+
+But how, in the other implications of such a scene, would he act?
+Until now his part in the inevitable frictions of matrimony had been
+conditioned by a tenderness toward Fanny and a measurable supporting
+belief that he was generally to blame. She had reduced him to the
+compounding of excuses; after her attack, drawing away, she had managed
+to make him follow her. Not cheaply, with the vulgarity of a gift, a
+price outheld, but with the repeated assertions of his endless love.
+Nothing less satisfied her. In this she was superior. But, even if he
+surrendered his life to the effort, could he keep up that pretence of
+a passion unimpaired? And had he, Lee asked himself over and over, the
+wish, the patience, for that heavy undertaking?
+
+It was still fairly evident that he hadn't. All that he could hope for,
+which they both could summon, was luck and the deadening hands of
+time. He told himself, here, that it was more than probable that he
+was exaggerating the proportions of the whole situation--Fanny had been
+angry before; her resentment faded the sooner for its swift explosive
+character. But this assurance was unconvincing; his presentiment, which
+didn't rest on reason, was not amenable to a reasonable conclusion.
+Of this he was certain, that Fanny never had harbored the suspicion of
+what, for her, would be the very worst. Did she know? If she did,
+he decided, it was only in the form of an unanalyzed, unidentified,
+feeling. She wasn't a coward. His determination to keep smooth, by mere
+politeness, the further course of their marriage seemed frivolous. That
+might do, it was even indispensable, when the present corner was turned;
+but for the moment--
+
+What, in the name of God, had got into her? He grew increasingly
+irritated at her arbitrary manner. Lee had kept forgetting that, where
+Fanny was concerned, it was causeless, or no better than a wild surmise,
+a chance thrust at random. He made up his mind that he wouldn't submit
+to a great deal of her bad humor. And, in this spirit, he ignored a
+query put to him bitingly:
+
+"Where is the paper cutter?"
+
+His gaze remained level on the page before him.
+
+"Didn't you hear me, Lee? I want the paper cutter. If it's on your night
+table, get it."
+
+"Let Amanda go up."
+
+"She's out. I let both the girls go tonight. But I needn't explain."
+She sat expectantly upright. Obliterating his cigarette, he returned,
+without moving, to the magazine. Then he raised his head:
+
+"You can't hope for much from that tone of voice."
+
+"I'll always insist on your showing me some courtesy. I can't imagine
+what you think I am. You lie to me as though I were a school-girl and
+you haven't even common good manners. That trip to New York--I'll hear
+the truth about it. Anyone could tell it was serious by the effect it
+had on you. Put down your magazine, you might as well; you can't keep on
+behind it forever. Why did you try to hide that Mrs. Grove and you were
+alone?"
+
+"To stop all this!" He dropped the magazine upon the floor. "To save
+my nerves and the noise of your eternal questions. I knew, if you found
+out, what would follow; this isn't the first time."
+
+"You can't be completely trusted," she replied. "I have always had to
+worry and hold you up. If it hadn't been for me--but there is no use in
+going into that. You must tell me about the Grove woman."
+
+"At one time it was Mrs. Grove," he observed; "now it is 'the Grove
+woman.' What will you call her next?"
+
+"You will have to tell me that," Fanny said. "Lee Randon, what must I
+call her?"
+
+"Perhaps, if you knew her, you'd try Savina."
+
+"Not if it was to save me from dying. But I have no doubt of which you
+preferred. Did you?"
+
+"Did I what?" He was aware that his speech was growing far louder than
+necessary.
+
+"Call her Savina."
+
+"Yes!" He sat glaring at her in an anger which he felt swelling his
+neck.
+
+Fanny's expression was obscure. At his admission she had shivered,
+as though it had reached her in the form of an actually threatened
+violence, and then she was rigid. "I knew that, all the while." Her
+voice was low, with a pause between the words. "Savina"; she repeated
+the name experimentally. "Very pretty. Prettier to say than Fanny; yes,
+and newer. And, having called her that, you couldn't very well not kiss
+her, could you?"
+
+However, his caution had again asserted itself over the dangers of
+a lost temper. "You have made so much of this up that you had better
+finish it yourself. Put what end you prefer on it; you don't need help."
+
+"The end," she echoed, in a strange and smothered voice. "Is this it?
+But not yet."
+
+Lee's gaze rested on the magazine lying spread half on the Eastern
+symbolism of a rug and half on the bare polished flooring. "Your story
+is far more interesting than any in that," he commented, with a gesture.
+"It's a pity you haven't turned your imagination to a better use." This,
+he recognized, could not go on indefinitely. Fanny added:
+
+"But I was wrong--you'd kiss her before you said Savina. That, I
+believe, is the way it works. It is really screaming when you think what
+you went to New York for--to protect Claire, to keep Peyton Morris out
+of Mina Raff's hands. And, apparently, you succeeded but got in badly
+yourself. What a pair of hypocrites you were: all the while worse than
+the others, who were at least excused by their youngness, ever could
+dream of being. What was the good of your contradicting me at first? I
+knew all along. I felt it."
+
+"What was it, exactly, that you felt?" he asked with an assumption of
+calmness.
+
+"I don't understand," she acknowledged, for the moment at a loss. "It
+was inside me, like lead. But, whatever happened, it will come out; it
+always does; and you'll be sorry."
+
+Did the truth, he wondered, always appear, and triumph over the false;
+was that precept of morality secure for those who depended on it? And,
+as Fanny threatened, would he be sorry? But most assuredly he would,
+for three reasons--Savina, Fanny, and himself; there might, even, be two
+more, Helena and Gregory; yes, and William Loyd Grove. What a stinking
+mess it was all turning out to be. Why wasn't life, why weren't women,
+reasonable? But he could not convince himself that anything final--a
+separation--threatened them. Fanny couldn't force an admission from him,
+nor speak of this, investigate it, anywhere else. Savina was well
+able to take care of herself. There was nothing to do but wait. In
+the process of that he once more picked up the magazine. Fanny said
+unexpectedly:
+
+"I ordered your Christmas present. It took all the money I had in the
+Dime Savings Bank." He muttered a phrase to the effect that Christmas
+was a season for children. This recalled his own--they wouldn't be
+asleep yet--and, to escape temporarily from an impossible situation, to
+secure the paper knife, he went up to see them.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+They greeted him vociferously: before he could turn on the light they
+were partly out of the covers, and the old argument about whose bed he
+should sit on in full progress. Helena's was by the door, so, returning
+her to the warmth of her blankets, he stopped beside her. The room,
+with the windows fully open, was cold, but he welcomed the white
+frozen purity of its barrenness. More than ever he was impressed by the
+remoteness of the children's bed-room from the passionate disturbances
+of living; but they, in the sense Fanny and he knew, weren't alive
+yet. They imitated the accents and concerns, caught at the gestures, of
+maturity; but, even in the grip of beginning instincts, they were hardly
+more sentient than the figures of a puppet show. Or, perhaps, their
+world was so far from his that they couldn't be said to span from one to
+the other. Gregory, in mind, was no more like him than a slip was like
+a tree bearing fruit--no matter how bitter. Helena more nearly resembled
+her mother; that had never occurred to him before.
+
+It was undoubtedly true--her posturing recalled the feminine attitude
+in extreme miniature. In that he felt outside her sympathy, she belonged
+with her mother; to Gregory he was far more nearly allied. Gregory,
+anyhow, had the potentialities of his own dilemma; he might, in years to
+come, be drawn out of a present reality by the enigma, the fascination,
+of Cytherea. Lee Randon hoped not; he wanted to advise him, at once,
+resolutely to close his eyes to all visions beyond the horizon of wise
+practicability. Marry, have children, be faithful, die, he said; but,
+alas, to himself. Gregory, smiling in eager anticipation of what might
+ensue, was necessarily ignorant of so much. Something again lay back of
+that, Lee realized--his occupation in life. There he, Lee, had made his
+first, perhaps most serious, mistake. While the majority of men turned,
+indifferent, from their labor, there were a rare few--hadn't he phrased
+this before?--lost in an edifice of the mind, scientific or aesthetic or
+commercial, who were happily unconscious of the lapsing fretful years.
+
+That was the way to cheat the sardonic gathered fates: to be deaf and
+blind to whatever, falsely, they seemed to offer; to get into bed heavy
+with weariness and rise hurried and absorbed. Over men so preoccupied,
+spent, Cytherea had no power. It was strange how her name had become
+linked with all his deepest speculations; she was involved in concerns
+remote from her apparent sphere and influence.
+
+"Gracious, you're thinking a lot," Helena said.
+
+"What are you thinking about?" Gregory added.
+
+"A doll," he replied, turning to his daughter.
+
+"For me," she declared.
+
+"No, me," Gregory insisted.
+
+Lee Randon shook his head. "Not you, in the least."
+
+"Of course not," Helena supported him. "I should think it would make you
+sick, father, hearing Gregory talk like that. It does me. Why doesn't he
+ask for something that boys play with?"
+
+"I don't want them, that's why," Gregory specified. "Perhaps I'd like to
+have a typewriter."
+
+"You're not very modest." It was Helena again.
+
+"It's father, isn't it? It isn't you."
+
+"Listen," Lee broke in, "I came up here to be with two good children;
+but where are they?"
+
+"I'm one." Helena, freeing herself definitely, closed her arms in a
+sweet warmth about his neck. "I'm one, too," Gregory called urgently.
+"No," his father pressed him back; "you must stay in bed. They are both
+here, I can see."
+
+He wondered if, everything else forgotten, his children could constitute
+a sufficient engagement; but the sentimental picture, cast across his
+thoughts, of himself being led by a child holding each of his hands
+defeated it. He was turned in another direction.
+
+Yet, tonight, they were remarkably engaging.... He had lost a great
+deal. For what? He couldn't--as usual--answer; but the memory of Savina,
+stronger than Fanny, metaphorically took Helena's arms away from his
+neck and blurred the image of Gregory. "Have you said your prayer?" he
+asked absent-mindedly making conversation. Oh, yes, he was informed,
+they did that with Martha. "I'll say mine again," Gregory volunteered.
+Again--a picture of a child, in a halo of innocence, praying at a
+paternal knee to a fresco of saccharine angels!
+
+"Once is enough," he answered hurriedly. "I am sure you do it very
+nicely."
+
+"Well, anyhow, better than Helena," Gregory admitted. "She hurries so."
+Lee instructed him to confine his observations to his own performance.
+Now was the time for him to deliver a small sermon on prayer to Helena.
+He recognized this, but he was merely incensed by it. What could
+he reply if they questioned him about his own devotions? Should he
+acknowledge that he thought prayer was no more than a pleasant form of
+administering to a sense of self-importance? Or, at most, a variety
+of self-help? Luckily they didn't ask. How outraged Fanny would be--he
+would be driven from the community--if he confessed the slightest of
+his doubts to his children. If, say at the table, when they were
+all together, he should drop his negative silence, his policy of
+nonintervention, what a horrified breathlessness would follow. His
+children, Lee thought, his wife, the servants in the kitchen, none knew
+him; he was a stranger to his own house.
+
+If he had still, quite desperately, instinctively, looked to Helena
+and Gregory for assistance, he had met a final failure. Brushed with
+sleepiness they were slipping away from him. He was reluctant to have
+them go, leave him; the distance between them and himself appeared to
+widen immeasurably as he stood watching them settle for the night. He
+wanted to call them back, "Helena and Gregory, Gregory!" But he remained
+quiet, his head a little bent, his heart heavy. The tide of sleep,
+silent, mystical, recompensing! It wasn't that, exactly, he was facing.
+
+Switching off the light he went into their playroom, scattered with
+bright toys, with alphabet blocks and an engine, a train of cars and
+some lengths of track, and a wooden steamboat on wheels gaily painted.
+Already these things had a look of indifferent treatment, of having
+been half cast aside. Gregory had wanted a typewriter; his jacket, at
+dancing-school, had been belted like his, Lee Randon's. They each had,
+in the lower hall, a bicycle on which they rode to and from school and
+to play. "Will he need me later?" Lee asked himself; "or will it be
+the same till the end?" But he had already decided that the latter was
+infinitely better.
+
+He lingered on the second floor, putting off from minute to minute the
+unavoidable taking up of Fanny's demands. She was, he knew, waiting for
+his appearance to begin again energetically. In their room it struck him
+forcibly that he must make some mental diagram of his course, his last
+unshakable position. Certainly in admitting that he had called Savina
+Grove by her first name he had justified Fanny's contention that he
+had kissed her. Fanny should have asked him how many times that had
+occurred. "A hundred," he heard himself, in fancy, replying. By God, he
+would like to say just that, and have it all over, done with. Instead he
+must lie cunningly, imperturbably, and in a monumental patience. Why? He
+hadn't, pointedly, asked that before. Things here, his life, the future,
+must be held together.
+
+After he had descended, he lingered in the hall: in the room where his
+wife was sitting not a sound was audible, there wasn't an indication of
+her presence. Lee turned away to the mantel-piece dominated by Cytherea.
+Here, he addressed himself silently to the doll, you're responsible for
+this. Get me out of it. I'll put it all in your hands, that hand you
+have raised and hold half open and empty. But his, he added, in an
+embittered lightness, was an affair of matrimony; it was a moral knot;
+and it had nothing to do with Cytherea, with the shape, the sea, the
+island, of Venus. She was merely disdainful.
+
+Fanny was seated in the chair, the exact position, in which he had left
+her. And when he returned to the place he had deserted, she took no
+notice of him.
+
+Her eyes were fixed in thought, her lips pinched. Was it only now, or
+had he never noticed it before, that her hands resembled her face, bony
+with a dry fine skin? Perhaps, heroically, she was thrusting the whole
+subject of Savina Grove from her mind; he couldn't tell; her exterior
+showed Lee Randon nothing, He waited, undecided if he'd smoke. Lee
+didn't, he found, want to. She shook her head, a startled look passed
+through her eyes, and Fanny sighed deeply. She seemed to come back
+from a far place. It was, of course, the past, her early aspirations;
+herself, young; but what, out of her remembrance, had she brought with
+her?
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Nothing.
+
+Her first words instantly dispelled what had many aspects of his last
+hope for peace. "It is surprising to me that you could go up to the
+children; but I suppose we must all be glad to have you pay attention to
+them at any time." This minor development he succeeded in avoiding. "I
+have been thinking hard," she continued, "and I have made up my mind
+about you; it is this--you just simply have to be different. I won't let
+you, us, stay like this. It is hideous."
+
+"You are quite right," he admitted; "and I have already agreed that the
+change must principally be in me. If you'd explain it to me, what you
+have decided on, we'll find out, if possible, how to go about it."
+
+"At least you needn't be sarcastic," she replied; "I am not as
+impossible as you make out. You will have to be different at home--"
+
+"I thought it was outside home you objected to."
+
+"It's one and the same," she went on; "and I won't have them, it, a
+minute longer. Not a minute! You have got to behave yourself."
+
+"You haven't been very definite yet."
+
+"Mrs. Grove--Savina," she flung back at him.
+
+"That is a name and not a fact."
+
+"It's a fact that you kissed her." Fanny leaned forward, flushed and
+tense, knocking over her stool. "And that you put your arms around her,
+and said--oh, I don't know what you did say. Did she mention me?"
+
+"Only indirectly," he replied with a gleam of malice; "neither of us
+did."
+
+"I am glad of that anyhow." But her vindictive tone betrayed the words.
+"Although I can easily guess why you didn't--you were ashamed. You did
+kiss her; why won't you admit it?"
+
+"What's the good? You've done that for me. You have convinced yourself
+so positively that nothing I could say would be of any use."
+
+"Did she call you Lee?"
+
+"Hell, Fanny, what a God-forsaken lot of young nonsense!" His anger was
+mounting. "You can understand here as well as later that I am not
+going to answer any of it; and I'll not listen to a great deal more.
+Sometimes, lately, you have been insulting, but now you are downright
+pathetic, you are so ridiculous."
+
+"You will stay exactly where you are until I get done." Her tone was
+perceptibly shriller. "And don't you dare call me pathetic; if you only
+knew--disgracing yourself in New York, with a family at home. It is too
+common and low and vulgar for words: like a travelling salesman. But
+I'll make you behave if I have to lock you up."
+
+Lee Randon laughed at her; and, at the contempt in his mirth, she rose,
+no longer flushed, but white with wrath. "I won't have it!" Her voice
+was almost a scream, and she brought her hands down so violently on the
+table that, as she momentarily broke the circuit of the electric lamp,
+there was a flash of greenish light. It was exactly as though her fury,
+a generated incandescence of rage, had burned into a perceptible flare.
+This, he realized, was worse than he had anticipated; he saw no safe
+issue; it was entirely serious. Lee was aware of a vague sorrow, a
+wish to protect Fanny, from herself as much as anything; but he was
+powerless. At the same time, with the support of no affection, without
+interest, his patience was rapidly vanishing. He was conscious of Fanny
+not as his wife, nor as a being lost in infinite suffering, but as a
+woman with her features strangely, grotesquely, twisted and drawn.
+
+His principal recognition was that she meant nothing to him; she wasn't
+even familiar; he couldn't credit the fact that they had long lived
+together in an entire intimacy. Dissolved by his indifference, the past
+vanished like a white powder in a glass of water. She might have been
+a woman overtaken by a mental paroxysm in the cold impersonality of a
+railway station. "Stop it," he commanded sharply; "you are hysterical,
+all kinds of a fool."
+
+"Only one kind," she corrected him, in a voice so rasped that it might
+have come from a rusted throat; "and I'm not going to be it much longer.
+You have cured me, you and that Savina. But what--what makes me laugh is
+how you thought you could explain and lie and bully me. Anything would
+do to tell me, I'd swallow it like one of those big grapes." She was
+speaking in gusts, between the labored heavings of her breast; her eyes
+were staring and dark; and her hands opened and shut, shut and opened,
+continuously. Fanny's cheeks were now mottled, there were fluctuating
+spots of red, blue shadows, on the pallor of her skin.
+
+"In a minute more you'll be sick," he warned her.
+
+"Oh, God," she whispered, "that's all he knows, all he feels! In a
+minute, a minute, I'll be sick. Don't you see, you damned fool," her
+voice rose until it seemed impossible that she could hold the pitch,
+"can't you understand I am dying?"
+
+"No." His terseness was calculated: that, he thought, would best control
+her wildness. "No one could be more alive. If I were you, though, I'd go
+up to bed; we've had enough of this, or I have; I can't speak for you.
+But, however that may be, and as I've said before, it has got to stop,
+now, at once."
+
+If it didn't, he continued silently, he wouldn't be eternally
+responsible for himself; never a patient man, what might follow the end
+of his endurance was unpredictable. His feeling toward the woman before
+him was shifting, as well; the indifference was becoming bitterness; the
+bitterness glittered, like mica, with points of hatred. He felt this,
+like an actual substance, a jelly-like poison, in his blood, affecting
+his body and mind. It bred in him a refined brutality, an ingenious
+cruelty. "A mirror would shut you up quicker than anything else," he
+informed her; "you look like a woman of sixty--go somewhere and fix your
+face."
+
+"It doesn't surprise me you are insulting," she replied, "but I didn't
+expect it quite so soon. I thought you might hide what you really were
+a little longer; it seemed to me you might try to keep something. But
+I guess it's better to have it all done with at once, and to meet the
+worst."
+
+"You talk as though there were no one but you in this," he said
+concisely; "and that I didn't matter. You'll find that I have a little
+to say. Here it is: I am tired of your suspicions and questions and
+insinuations. You haven't any idea of marriage except as a bed-room
+farce. You're so pure that you imagine more indecencies in a day than I
+could get through with in five years. If there were one I hadn't thought
+of, you'd have me at it in no time. It was pleasant at the Groves'
+because there was none of this infernal racket. Mrs. Grove, no--Savina,
+is a wise woman. I was glad to be with her, to get away--"
+
+"Go back, then!" Fanny cried. "Don't bother about me and your home and
+the children. You brought me here, and made me have them, all the blood
+and tearing; but that doesn't matter. Not to you! I won't let you touch
+me again."
+
+"That needn't trouble you," he assured her.
+
+"Not ... when you have her ... to touch." She could scarcely articulate,
+each word was pronounced as though it had cost a separate and strangling
+effort. "You vile, rotten coward!"
+
+The flood of her hysteria burst so suddenly that, unprepared, he was
+overwhelmed with its storm of tears and passionate charges. "You ought
+to be beaten till you fell down. You wouldn't say these things to me,
+treat me like this, if I weren't helpless, if I could do anything. But
+I can't, and you are safe. I am only your wife and not some filthy woman
+in New York." As she moved her head the streaming tears swung out from
+her face. "God damn you." Her hand went out to the table and, rising, it
+held the heavy dull yellow paper cutter. Before he could draw back she
+struck him; the copper point ripped down his jaw and hit his shoulder a
+jarring blow.
+
+In an instant of passion Lee Randon caught Fanny by the shoulders and
+shook her until her head rolled as though her neck were broken. Even in
+his transport of rage, with his fingers dug into her flesh, he stopped
+to see if this were true.
+
+It wasn't. She swayed uncertainly, dazed and gasping, while her hair,
+shaken loose from its knot, slowly cascaded over one shoulder. Then
+stumbling, groping, with a hand on a chair, against the frame of the
+door, she went out of the room.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Lee's jaw bled thickly and persistently; the blood soaked, filled, his
+handkerchief; and, going to the drawer in the dining-room where the
+linen was kept, he secured and held against a ragged wound a napkin, He
+was nauseated and faint. His rage, killed, as it were, at its
+height, left him with a sensation of emptiness and degradation. The
+silence--after the last audible dragging footfall of Fanny slowly
+mounting the stairs--was appalling: it was as though all the noise of
+all the world, concentrated in his head, had been stopped at once and
+forever. He removed the sop from the cut, and the bleeding promptly took
+up its spreading over his throat and under his collar. That blow had
+killed a great deal: the Lee Randon married to Fanny was already dead;
+Fanny, too, had told him that she was dying, killed from within. It was
+a shame.
+
+He was walking when it occurred to him that he had better keep quiet;
+if the blood didn't soon stop he should require help; he was noticeably
+weak. His feeling with regard to Fanny was confined to curiosity, but
+mainly his thoughts, his illimitable disgust, were directed at himself.
+His anger, returning like the night wind from a different direction,
+cut at himself, at the collapse of his integrity. He was, in reality,
+frightened at what had been no better than a relapse into a state of
+mania; he was shocked at the presence, however temporary, of a frenzy of
+madness.
+
+Nothing had altered his attitude toward the woman who was his wife; all
+his active emotions for her had gone. Then his attention was drawn from
+his personality to his life, his surroundings; they were suffocating.
+Not to be borne! Nowhere could he discover a detail, an episode, that
+had the importance of reality. He had a sensation of being wrapped in a
+feather bed, the need to make a violent gesture--sending the white
+fluff whirling through space--and so be free to breathe. This house, the
+symmetrical copied walls, the harmonious rugs, symbols of public success
+and good opinion, the standard of a public approbation, exasperated him
+beyond endurance. He wanted to push the walls out, tear the rugs into
+rags, and scatter them contemptuously before the scandalized inertness
+of Eastlake. Lee had what was regarded as an admirable existence,
+an admirable family--the world imposed this judgment on him; and the
+desire, the determination, swept over him to smash to irremediable atoms
+what was so well applauded.
+
+The thought fascinated him: to break his life wide open. He'd let it
+go, it was worthless to him, the companies and bonds and the woman and
+children, the jog-trotting on fenced roads, the vain pretentions of
+the country club, the petty grasping at the petticoats--where they were
+worn--of variety. Lee wished that he could do this in the presence
+of everyone he knew; he wanted to see their outraged faces, hear
+the shocked expressions, as he insulted, demolished, all that they
+worshipped. The blood, he found, had stopped; his hurt was relatively
+unimportant. The fever of rebellion, of destruction, increased in him
+until it was as violent, as blinding, as his earlier fury; and he went
+at once in search of Fanny.
+
+She had undressed, and, in a nightgown effectively drawn with blue
+ribbons, she lay face down across the bottom of her bed. One shoulder,
+immaculately white except for the leaden bruises of his fingers, was
+bare, and an arm, from which her jewelled wrist watch had not been
+removed, was outstretched. He stood above her, but, breathing faintly,
+she made no sign of a consciousness of his presence.
+
+"Fanny," he began, speaking with an effort of calmness out of his
+laboring being, "this is all over for me. As I told you so many times,
+I've had too much of it. It's yours, anyhow, and the children are yours,
+and you may do what you like with the whole affair. I'm done." Still she
+didn't move, reply. "I am going," he said more impatiently, "tonight. I
+want you to understand that this is final. You were too good a wife;
+I couldn't keep even with you; and I can't say, now, that I want to.
+Everyone will tell you that I am no good--you see, I haven't the shadow
+of a cause for leaving--and the best thing you can do is believe them.
+If I had what was recognized as a reason for going, I'd stay, if that
+has any sense; you may put your own interpretation on it."
+
+She turned and half rose, regarding him from the edge of the bed. Her
+face, no longer brightly mottled, was sunken, and dull with despair. "I
+can't talk," she said; "the words are all hard like stones down in
+my heart. You'll have to go; I can't stop you; I knew you had gone
+yesterday, or was it last week? I saw it was a hopeless fight but I
+tried, I had to; I thought your memory would help."
+
+"It wasn't Savina who did this," he informed her; "I want you to realize
+that fully. Whatever happens, she is not to blame. All, all the fault
+is mine; it would take too long to explain, you wouldn't believe me--you
+couldn't--and so I am deserting you. That is the word for it, the one
+you will use." Fanny gazed at him in a clouding perplexity.
+
+"I can't think it's true." Her voice was dazed. "A thing like this
+couldn't be happening to us, to me. It's only for a little, we are both
+cross--"
+
+He cut her short with the assurance that what he said he meant.
+Sentimental indulgence, he felt, was dangerously out of place. She
+slipped back, supine, on the bed; and, with short sobs, she cried, "Go!
+Go! Go!"
+
+In his room he methodically and thoughtfully assembled the necessities
+for his bag; he was arranging mentally the details of his act. Where,
+primarily, it affected Fanny and the children, his lawyers could
+handle it best; it was the present consequences to himself, the
+step immediately before him, that demanded consideration. But his
+deliberation was lost in the knowledge that he would go to New York
+where, inevitably, he should see Savina. No one could predict what would
+determine that; it would unfold, his affair with Savina must conclude,
+as it had begun--in obedience to pressures beyond their control. An
+increasing excitement flowed over him at the thought of being with her,
+possessing her, again. There was no doubt of that in his mind; he knew
+that Savina would come to him. She was far more ruthless in brushing
+aside artificial barriers, prejudices, than, until now, he. The figure
+of William Grove occupied him for a little, but he seemed insubstantial,
+not so much a being as a convention to be smashed in his own house.
+
+Lee Randon decided not to speak again, to say good-bye, to Fanny. It
+would only multiply the difficulties of his leaving; she might have
+another attack of rage, or--worse--of affection. He was amazed at his
+lack of feeling, a little disturbed: perhaps there was something fatally
+wrong, lacking, about him, and he was embarked on the first violent
+stage of physical and mental degradation. It couldn't be helped, he told
+himself, once more down stairs, in the hall. Beyond, the stool lay where
+Fanny had kicked it; and he bent over to pick up the copper paper cutter
+from the floor. Putting it on the table, he reflected that Fanny would,
+in all probability, destroy it. His handkerchief, stiff, black with
+dried blood, was in the crystal ash holder with a mahogany stand; and
+that, as unnecessarily unpleasant, he hid in a pocket.
+
+The electric globe in the floor lamp was yellow; it was nearly burned
+out and would have to be replaced. This had been his special corner,
+the most comfortable in the pen. But the pig, he remembered, had
+been slaughtered last week; and he wondered if the parallel he
+had established would hold true to the end. In the main aspect, he
+concluded, yes. But the pig had died without experiencing what was,
+undoubtedly, both the fundamental duty and recompense of living. The
+pig, happily or unhappily, had remained in ignorance of Cytherea and the
+delights of love; but, perhaps, if only for the moment, he had better
+call that passion; it was a word of clearer, more exact, definition.
+
+He left the house walking, carrying his bag up the hill into Eastlake:
+a train left for the city at eleven-fifty-eight. Lee turned, beyond his
+property, and saw the light burning in what had been his and Fanny's
+room; the rest of the house, except for the glimmer below, was dark.
+The winter night was encrusted with stars. A piercing regret seized
+him--that he was past the middle of forty and not in the early twenties.
+To be young and to know Savina! To be young and free. To be young ...
+the increasing rapidity with which he went forward had the aspect of an
+endeavor to waste no more precious time.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The brief level voice of Savina Grove arranging over the telephone
+an hour, very late in the afternoon, for him to call, gave Lee a
+comparatively long time in which to examine his feelings, particularly
+in connection with Savina. His state of mind, his intentions, he
+realized, should be clear for the moment when he saw her. In general
+they were; but the particulars, the details of any probable immediate
+action, evaded him. He should have to consult her about them. What he
+most firmly grasped of all was that he couldn't--what, in reality, he
+breathed to himself was they--remain in New York. The comparatively
+orderly and delayed legal arrangement projected by the Morrises and Mina
+Raff seemed to have no application to the impetuosity of the situation
+before him. However, he was advancing at a speed, to a position, for
+which there was no warrant. None at all. Perhaps Savina, satisfied by
+the one occasion which--he had been so careful to insist--must be the
+last, would regard him as merely importunate.
+
+Strictly held to discretion by the fact of Fanny, Savina might have
+found him then--more available than when free--only the acceptable model
+of an indiscreet man. Yet, he reminded himself, he hadn't left Eastlake,
+broken wide open his home, on account of Savina. This, he again
+insisted, would have happened independently of her; his life in Eastlake
+had broken up of its own accord; its elements had been too tenuous for
+the withstanding any longer of the stress of existence. But, he was
+forced to add, the collapse had been hastened by his knowledge of
+Savina. And this brought him to the examination of what, at bottom, she
+meant to him. What was her significance, her bulk, in his life?
+
+That could be approached only through an understanding of his feeling
+for her, what it was now and what it might become; not conspicuously
+easy of comprehension. Lee tried the old, the long inaccurately used,
+word, love. He asked himself the question squarely--did he love Savina?
+Damned if he knew! He might reply to that, he thought ruefully, if he
+grasped what love was, what the blasted phrase meant. As it was, it
+seemed to Lee, a dictionary of synonyms would be helpless to make all
+its varied significances distinct. He tried a simpler approach--did he
+want to be with Savina more than with anyone else? At last he had put
+a question to himself that he could answer: he most assuredly preferred
+being with Savina to anyone else he knew. But that alone would not have
+taken him to her.
+
+A simple desire on his part, naive like a daisy, could not have
+overthrown the structure of his being. Yet the connection between the
+two, the woman and the event, was undeniable, his impulse to go to her
+now irresistible. That last word, as fully as any, expressed what lately
+had happened to him. He was considering the occurrences logically while
+the fact was that logic hadn't been touched on, summoned, once. He had
+moved emotionally and not intellectually; he hadn't known, from hour
+to hour, in what direction he would proceed. Certainly nothing could be
+said in his defense on the score of common sense; that, though, didn't
+disturb him; at a time when he might have been said to rely on it,
+common sense had failed him utterly. He had thrown that over his
+shoulder. Nor was he searching for an exterior justification of his
+present anomalous position, for, briefly, an excuse; excuses were
+the furthest of all things from his mind. The truth was that he was
+decidedly exhilarated, as though he had left the hard narrow road for a
+gallop over the green. He was merely dwelling on, analyzing, the present
+as it was becoming the newly promising, the opening, future.
+
+But he did need to understand--for an attitude, a choice of speech, if
+nothing else--his feeling for Savina. It consisted principally in the
+tyrannical desire to be with her, to sink in the immeasurable depths
+of her passion, and there lose all consciousness of the trivial mundane
+world. That, Lee felt, given the rest, the fact that he was here as he
+was, was sufficient; but--again still--he had had no voice in it.
+The passion had inundated him in the manner of an incoming tide and
+a low-water rock. Abruptly, after a certain misleading appearance of
+hesitation on the part of the waves, he had gone under. Well, it was
+very pleasant. In his case the celebrated maxims were wrong.
+
+He left this, for the moment, and returned to what, actually, lay ahead
+of him. Would Savina go away with him, leave the correct William, the
+safety of their New York house in the style of eighteen-eighty? Lee
+considered in her two impulses, not alike--her overwhelming passion,
+herself generally; and her admission, no, cry, that she loved him,
+or the special part he had in her. It rather looked as though he'd be
+successful. It did for a fact. He had not been idle through all the day,
+but had drawn from the Harriman Bank twenty thousand dollars. So
+much had not been necessary; it was very bad business to segregate in
+idleness such a sum of money now; but he enjoyed the extravagance of it.
+Prudence, frugality, was no longer a factor in his affairs.
+
+His present personal liberty, more complete than it had ever
+been before--than, he added lightly, it might ever be again--was
+astonishingly soothing. Sitting comfortably in a room in his customary
+hotel, there wasn't a pressure that could be brought to bear on him. It
+was now twenty minutes past four, he was to go to Savina at a quarter to
+six, and until then there was nothing, nothing, to force him this way
+or that: no directors' meetings, gabbling East-lake figures,
+responsibility, housewife or children. He hadn't realized the extent to
+which he had been surrounded and confined, the imponderable mass of what
+he had not only been indifferent to but actually disliked. He could lie
+down--he had been up the entire past night--and be called in an hour;
+he could sit as he was, in an unbuttoned waistcoat with his legs
+comfortably spread out; he could motor or walk on Fifth Avenue; smoke;
+drink--all in an inviolable security of being.
+
+Or, going back to that moment when he had, so mistakenly, turned aside
+from visionary promptings to a solid comfortable career, he might--what
+was it?--write. Perhaps his sharp regret at the loss of his youth was
+premature, youth itself comparatively unimportant. But no, that would
+involve him in fresh distasteful efforts, imperceptibly it would build
+up a whole new world of responsibilities: writing would be arduous,
+editors captious, and articles, stories, books, tie him back again to
+all that from which he had so miraculously escaped. Savina would be
+enough. What a beautiful body, so unexpectedly full, she had; how
+astounding, intoxicating, was the difference between what she seemed to
+be and what she was. Lee Randon thought with amused pity of the files
+of men who must have passed by her, with the most considerate bows, in
+ignorance of the inner truth.
+
+ That discovery, while, naturally, it had not been entirely reserved
+for him, had accumulated in a supreme delight, been kept back, like the
+best of all presents, for the last. He was glad that it wasn't too
+late for him to enjoy it. Here, suddenly, intervening in the midst of
+a prosaic drudgery, a tepid and meaningless period, was a magnificent
+relief. By God, would he take advantage of it! Would he! There was a
+knock at the door, and the hotel valet hung a freshly pressed suit
+in the closet; the shoes into which he intended to change were in a
+perfection of readiness; laid out were a heavy blue silk shirt and a
+dull yellow tie. Lee got these various carefully selected articles of
+dress slowly, exactly, on. His pearl pin Fanny had given him! Well, it
+was a good pearl, selected personally by a celebrated dealer; and Lee
+was obliged to her, nothing more. He lighted a cigarette, collected his
+hat and gloves, his overcoat and stick, and descended in the elevator in
+a mood of unrestrained enjoyment.
+
+The door attendant, who knew him, whistled for a taxi-cab, commenting
+lightly on the visible accident to his jaw. But, in spite of it, Lee had
+an appearance, as he phrased it, of good luck. The world, he said, was
+evidently in favor of Mr. Randon. The latter agreed that it had such a
+look. He was positively jovial. He dismissed the cab before the familiar
+entrance on East Sixty-sixth Street, and was admitted immediately: the
+servant caught his coat, and he went into the drawing-room. There had
+been, he saw, a tea; the confusion lingering from a crowd was evident;
+the cups, on all the available surfaces, had not been removed; in a
+corner were the skeleton-like iron music racks of a small orchestra;
+ash trays were overflowing; and a sealskin muff, with a bunch of violets
+pinned to it, had been left.
+
+Savina had gone upstairs, but she would be down at once. Lee was turned
+away from the door when she entered; she was wearing a cloth dress of
+dull red--hadn't he heard it called Cuba color?--with a heavy girdle of
+grotesque intertwined silver figures. With a single glance behind her
+she swept forward into Lee's arms, her mouth held up to his.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Listening closely to all that he had to say, she sat with her
+hands quietly folded on crossed knees. Perhaps twice she nodded,
+comprehendingly. "And so," he ended, "that is what has occurred. We are
+not to blame ourselves too much, as I've explained; the thing happened
+within itself, died of its own accord. But the past doesn't need our
+attention now. The future is the thing. What is it going to be? What,"
+he hesitated, "can we make it? Maybe everything, or nothing."
+
+"Are you leaving that for me to decide?" she asked.
+
+"To a great extent I have to; I don't want to appear to take so much for
+granted. And then, only you can measure what I have to offer. I believe
+what I have done is considered serious, if not ruinous; but that I can't
+help thinking is exaggerated. I haven't been struck down yet. I don't,
+candidly, now, expect to be. You ought to come to this through your
+head, and not the heart, which I'd naturally prefer you to use. What,
+in fact, I am asking you is to go away with me, to live with me. I shall
+not, and you couldn't, very well, return. It's quite final, in other
+words. I must find out, too, if the irregularity upsets you. That need
+only be temporary. Grove and Fanny, I am sure, wouldn't persist in being
+disagreeable. But, if they did, we'd have to face that as well, the
+consequences of my--my impatience.
+
+"No, don't answer so quickly. Do you know me, are you sure you'd be
+happy, satisfied, with me? I have some money, not a great deal for
+myself now; I should say fifteen thousand dollars a year. Fanny, very
+rightfully--for herself and the children--will get most of what I have.
+And then, are you wedded, if not to your individual life here, to New
+York? We should have to go away to some place rather vague--"
+
+"Cuba," she broke in.
+
+The irony of that suggestion carried him back to the many vainly
+projected trips there with Fanny. His brother was in Cuba, it was true;
+but that might turn out excellently: Daniel would be able to help
+them in the difficult readjustments to follow. He was intelligent,
+unprejudiced and calm and, Lee added, remote from the values, the
+ponderous authority, of a northern hypocritical society. Then he forgot
+that in the realization that Savina was going away with him, that
+she was to be his, not for a solitary stolen night, but for years ...
+openly, completely. He lost his self control and kissed her, heedless
+of the open doors. Now she was cooler than Lee, and pushed him away.
+"William will be in at any minute," she explained:
+
+"When shall we leave?"
+
+"We might take a train tonight for Washington, since we'll need
+passports and I have to have an income tax receipt, and we can manage
+all that best there. Then Key West, Havana, anywhere. We will hope
+to get off without trouble; but, if Grove interferes, accept the
+consequences as they come."
+
+"Very well." Savina grew still quieter as the march of events became
+headlong. "I can live without a maid for a while. Tonight I won't dress
+for dinner, this will do very nicely for the train; and come as soon
+after as I can pack a bag. There will be literally nothing in it; my
+summer things are all out of reach. Washington will be convenient for
+me, too. Unless you want to see William again--" She rose.
+
+"Not particularly," he acknowledged; "though I wouldn't drive around
+the city to avoid him. Somehow--I may be blind--I can't think that I am
+doing him an infamous wrong: that he lost you proves that. Why, under
+the circumstances, should you, anyone, stay? I don't feel a particle
+immoral, or even devilish. It's all so sensible and balanced and
+superior. No, no, let William watch out for himself; his club, he's so
+devoted to, won't fail him. Fanny and he will have their whole worlds to
+sympathize with their injury. We don't need sympathy."
+
+Lee walked back to the hotel, the pig-skin wrapped walking stick
+swinging from an arm, his bearing confident and relaxed. He stopped at
+the desk for a conference with the porter--a basket of fruit from the
+restaurant, and, if procurable regularly or irregularly, a drawing-room
+on the Washington train. Then he went up and closed his bag: he had
+time for dinner and several cigars afterwards; he wasn't hungry, but the
+ceremony would kill the intervening two hours and more.
+
+The porter found him later and delivered his tickets, including the
+check for a drawing-room, secured as irregularly as possible from
+the Pullman conductor. There were, it began to seem, to be no minor
+annoyances. At a few minutes before ten he was standing, as he had
+arranged with Savina, with his bag before the hotel; and, just past
+the hour, the cab which held her turned in to the sidewalk. She had two
+bags, but one was very small--her toilet things, she explained--and
+she was carrying a jewel case. There wasn't a tremor in her voice or
+bearing, the slightest indication that they were going farther than
+a theatre in the vicinity of Forty-fourth Street. Internally, Lee was
+excited, filled with the long strange sense of holiday.
+
+"William went to the club," Savina told him with a smile edged with
+malice; "everything was as usual when he left, but when he gets back
+it will be changed. I'm sorry to miss his expression when he reads the
+letter I wrote; he won't show it to anyone."
+
+"That sounds as though you really disliked him," Lee observed. Then he
+remembered the hatred he had felt for Fanny. Matrimony had a brutal hand
+for superficial relationships and conventions. He had spoken lightly
+but, watching her, he saw the grimness of her passion strike the
+animation from her face. The jewel case slid over the softness of her
+wrap to the floor, her hand crept under his cuff, clinging to his arm.
+
+Going immediately to their train, they found the fruit in the
+drawing-room; the porter stopped to knock at the door and discover
+if they were in need of his attendance. They heard dimly the train's
+muffled boring under the river and were conscious of the swimming lights
+of the Jersey plain, the confused illuminated darkness of cities,
+the tranquility of open country, the ringing echo of bridges and
+the sustained wail of their locomotive. They were, again, reaching
+Washington, close in a taxi-cab; Savina's jewel case again fell
+unheeded; and again, after the shortest halt possible, they
+were whirling south in a drawing-room where night and day were
+indistinguishable one from the other.
+
+On the rear platform of the orange-painted train moving deliberately
+along the Florida coast Lee was first aware of the still, saturating
+heat; that, in itself, was enough to release him from the winter-like
+grip of Eastlake. He lost all sense of time, of hurry, of the necessity
+of occupation as opposed to idleness, of idleness contrasted with sleep.
+The promise of satiation, of inevitability, steeped his being in a
+pleasant lethargy. It was the same to him if they moved or stopped,
+whether they arrived at the next destination or remained forever in a
+sandy monotony of tomato fields or by a slow pass of water cutting the
+harshness of palmettos. On the viaducts he gazed with half-closed eyes
+across the sapphire and emerald green and purple water; or, directly
+under him, he looked down incuriously into a tide so clear that it
+seemed no more than a breath ruffling the sand beneath.
+
+Savina, who had discarded cloth for dull white linen--she wished, she
+explained, to make the transition as sharply as possible--was more
+alertly interested in their constantly shifting surroundings; they were
+significant to her as the milestones of her incredible escape. On the
+steamer for Havana, marking their effects deposited in a cabin with a
+double iron bed and unpleasantly ubiquitous basins, she explained to Lee
+that she never got seasick; but he might have gathered that, she pointed
+out, by her willingness to undertake Cuba. Admitting that he had missed
+this feminine subtlety, he arranged two deck chairs in an advantageous
+angle, and they sat enveloped in a mildness which, heavy with the odor
+of water-soaked wood, was untroubled by any wind. When the steamer left
+its pier Savina put a hand inside one of his. The harbor lights dropped,
+pair by pair, back into the night; the vibration of the propeller
+became a sub-conscious murmur; over the placid water astern a rippling
+phosphorescence was stirred and subsided. A motion, increasing by
+imperceptible degrees, affected the deck; there was a rise and fall,
+regular and sleep-impelling: the uneasiness of the Gulf Stream. Havana
+floated into their waking vision, a city of white marble set in lustrous
+green, profound indigo, against the rosy veil of a morning sun.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The fortunate chance that took them to the Inglaterra Hotel--the disdain
+of its runner was more persuasive than the clamor of all the others who
+had boarded the steamer--found them a room, they soon discovered, in
+what was at once the most desirable and the most unlikely place. They
+might have the chamber until Tuesday, Lee was told, in an English
+inflected with the tonal gravity of Spain. It was hardly past eight in
+the morning, an awkward hour to arrive newly at a city, he thought,
+as they were carried up in the elevator. The details of the floor, the
+hall, they crossed, engaged his interest; not alone for the height of
+the ceiling, which was excessive, but because of the palms, the pointed
+Moorish arches filled with green painted wood lattices; the totality of
+an effect different from anything else he had seen.
+
+Their room, with the lift of the ceiling emphasized by the confined
+space, was more engaging still: tall slatted doors opened on an iron
+railed balcony, the bath-room was like a tunnel on end, and the floor an
+expanse of polished mosaic in a pattern of yellow and grey. Lee walked
+out on the balcony; directly below and across a narrow paved street
+was a floridly impressive building obviously for the purpose of varied
+assemblages, and on his left a park was laid in concrete walks, royal
+palms on towering smooth dull trunks, unfamiliar trees with a graceful
+dense foliage, and innumerable stacked iron chairs about the marble
+statue of a man with a pointing hand. These details, however, were
+slowly gathered from an effect the whole of which was bewilderingly
+white, a whiteness intolerably luminous in the dazzling bath of the sun.
+
+It was a scene, a city, Lee recognized, more foreign to his own than
+any he knew in western Europe; a difference that existed mainly in the
+tropical heat, visible in languorous waves rising from blanched walls
+and streets already--so early--fervent. Savina was filled with delight;
+a positive color glowed in place of the customary uniform pallor of her
+cheeks; she opened her bags with an irresistible youthful energy. "Think
+what we have been missing," she called above the sound of the water
+running into the tub; "and what we accepted so long for living. I
+suppose the wonderful thing is that we escaped. Lee, do you realize that
+almost no one does? They never never get away, but go from one grave,
+from one winter, to another. Isn't it strange, when what we did is so
+very easy.
+
+"I'd like to tell a hundred people in New York that they could get away
+too, unfreeze themselves. When we drove horses I used to be surprised
+that they went along so quietly in blinders; they never seemed to learn
+that one kick would break into splinters the thing dragging on them.
+People are like that, I was and you were, too--in blinders. We've torn
+ours off, Lee. Tell me that you are glad." He was, without reserve.
+Tranquilly finding his razors, he was aware of a permeating contentment
+in what they had done. It was exactly as Savina had said--the forces
+which had held them in a rigorous northern servitude had proved, upon
+assault, to be no more than a defense of painted prejudices, the canvas
+embrasures of hypocrisy.
+
+"It is astonishing, what so many people put up with," he agreed; "but
+then," Lee added, in a further understanding, "it isn't so much what you
+knock down as what you carry away, take everywhere, inside you. When an
+arrangement like ours fails, that, mostly, I suspect, is the cause.
+It needs a special sort of fitness. Take the hundred people you spoke
+of--I'd be willing to bet not five of them could get away from the past,
+or put out of their minds what they are brought up on. Privately they
+would think they were wicked, damned, or some such truck; and, sure
+enough, that alone would finish them."
+
+"I haven't a speck of that," Savina admitted serenely; "I am happy.
+And I don't even have to ignore the thought of your wife and children;
+they'll get along just as well, maybe better, without you. William
+doesn't need me; he hasn't for a number of years. But we had to have
+each other."
+
+Lee Randon considered this in relation to his feeling that he had not
+left Eastlake, Fanny, because of Savina. He was still convinced that
+his life had fallen apart of itself; but he began to see that Savina had
+been more deeply involved in his act of liberty than he had suspected.
+Without her it was probable that he would have continued to the end in
+the negative existence of Eastlake; yet no amount of mere assurance that
+that was the only admirable, the only permissible, course was valid with
+him unless he had a corroborating belief. And all that he might once
+have possessed had left him at the final blow dealt by the passion of
+Savina and himself.
+
+She had been stronger than the assembled forces of heredity and precept
+and experience; her strength was superhuman; it was incredible that her
+slender body could hold such an impulse, a fury really, of vitality.
+Women must have been like that in earlier ages of humanity; but they
+were no longer; their passion had been wasted, spent, or turned aside
+into exhausting by-paths of sensation. He had finished shaving and, when
+they were dressed, they went down to breakfast in a dining-room with
+a marble floor and walls lustrous with bronze tiling. They had tall
+glasses of iced orange juice; and, with the last fragrant draught of
+coffee, Lee lighted a long bland cigar.
+
+"If you like," he proceeded comfortably, "you may rush around and see
+as much of the city as possible. There is a big omnibus at the door.
+Personally, I am going to do nothing of the kind. I intend to sit and
+smoke, and then--smoke and sit. I am done with the proper and expected
+thing in every one of its forms. I have always hated churches; and the
+spots where soldiers fell or martyrs were burned, monuments, just annoy
+me; and picture galleries give me colds in the head. Above all else I
+don't want to be improved; if I hear a fact of any sort I am going to
+bed for the rest of the day."
+
+"I don't care about those, either," Savina assented; "but the stores,
+yes. I have to have a mantilla and a high comb right away, now; and--I
+warn you--if it's only in our room I'm going to wear them. If I could
+get you into it I'd bring back a shell jacket covered with green braid
+and a wide scarlet sash, or whatever an espada wears."
+
+"A guitar and a carnation ought to do," he responded. "Count on me for
+nothing until the evening, when, if you care to, we'll drive along the
+sea, one way and then the other, and have dinner where we happen to be.
+I hope you will wear the most extravagant and holiday clothes--white,
+and very ruffled and thin, would be nice, with emeralds."
+
+"It's a good thing I have a lot of money," she observed; "you have some,
+of course, but it wouldn't begin to support your ambitions."
+
+"I don't even care which of us has it," he admitted; "so it's there.
+A year ago I should have looked pained and insisted that I couldn't
+accept, nor allow you to use, your own money. I don't exactly have to
+ask you for a taxi-cab fare, though, luckily; but if you did bring
+the emeralds I saw you wearing in New York don't throw them away on my
+account."
+
+"They are here," she assured him. "William gave them to me when we were
+married."
+
+"Splendid, together with Fanny's pearl," he replied placidly; "I was
+afraid they had been a legacy from your mother. I much prefer them to
+have been William's--it will give them such a Utopian sparkle."
+
+When Savina had gone, in a long brightly-painted car summoned from the
+line backed at the plaza's edge, Lee Randon returned to their room. The
+heat of the day, approaching noon, the ceaseless noise of Havana rose
+diffused to the balcony where he sat until the circling sunlight
+forced him to move inside. What amazing comfort! A curiously impersonal
+admiration for Savina grew with the understanding of her exceptionally
+perceptive being. She was what, above all else, he would have chosen for
+a companion: her extraordinary feeling was sheathed, tempered, in the
+satin of a faultless aesthetic sense; the delicacy of her body was
+resembled by the fineness of her feminine mind; she was entirely,
+deliciously, decorative. The black brocade mules by her bed were
+characteristic of her--useless charming objects that had cost
+twenty, thirty, dollars. Their sliding tap on the glazed floor was an
+appreciable part of his happiness; Savina's bottles on a dressing-table
+were engraved crystal with gold stoppers: it was all as it should be.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+When she returned she redressed her hair, drawing it back across her
+ears, put in at a provocative angle a fan-like carved shell comb, and
+twisted a shawl of flame-colored silk--it was a manton, she instructed
+him--about her shoulders. The guise of Andalusia was very becoming to
+her. For a dinner, Savina wore the filmy white and emeralds; they went
+to a restaurant like a pavilion on a roof, their table, by a low masonry
+wall, overlooking the harbor entrance. The heat of the day, cloaked in
+night, was cooled by the trade wind moving softly across the sea; the
+water of the harbor was black, like jet shining with the reflections of
+the lights strung along the shore; the lighthouse at Morro Castle marked
+the rocky thrust of the land. The restaurant was crowded: beyond Lee
+were four officers of the Spanish navy in snowy linen and corded gilt;
+in the subdued light the faces of women, under wide flowery hats, were
+illusive and fascinating; everywhere the deep crimson of Castilian wines
+was set against the amber radiance of champagne.
+
+Directly below, shadowy trees hid the stone margin of the bay, and
+an enormous tripod, such as might be used for removing the cargoes of
+ships, raised its primitive simplicity. "Look, Lee!" Savina laid a hand
+on his wrist. A steamer, incredibly large and near, was moving slowly
+out through the narrow channel to the sea. Rows of golden lights shone
+on its decks and from the port-holes, and a drift of music reached
+him. "Some day soon," she went on, "we'll take a boat like that, and
+go--where? It doesn't matter: to a far strange land. Hills scented with
+tea flowers. Streets with lacquered houses. Villages with silver bells
+hung along the eaves. Valleys of primroses under mountains of ice.
+We'll see them all from little windows, and then it will be night. But,
+principally, we will never go back--never! never! never! We will be
+together for years. Let's go to the hotel now; Lee. I am rather tired;
+it's the heat, don't you think? I am worn, and, because I am so happy,
+a trifle dizzy. Not much. Nothing to worry about. But I only want you,
+Lee; in my heart I don't care for the valleys and bells and scents."
+
+Yet, before they reached the hotel they stopped, Savina insisted, for
+cocktails of Bacardi rum, fragrant with fresh limes and sweet with
+a crust of sugar that remained at the bottoms of the glasses. In the
+night--their beds were separated by the width of the balcony doors--she
+called for him, acute with fright. "What is it?" she cried. "Hark,
+Lee, that horrible sound." The air was filled with a drumming wail,
+a dislocated savage music, that affected him like a nightmare grown
+audible.
+
+"It's coming from across the street, from the Opera House," he told her;
+"some kind of a dance, I'm certain." Patently it was an orchestra,
+but the instruments that composed it, the measures woven of frantic
+screaming notes and dull stale iterations, he had no means of
+identifying. "Bedlam in the jungle," he said soothingly. She wished it
+would stop. Soon he agreed with her; without pause, without variation,
+with an insistence which became cruel, and then unbearable, it went
+on. Lee Randon, after an uneasiness which culminated in an exasperated
+wrath, found a degree of exactness in his description: it was,
+undoubtedly, the jungle, Africa, debased into a peculiarly harrowing
+travesty of later civilized emotions. Finally he lost the impression of
+a meaninglessness; it assumed a potency, a naked reality, more profound
+than anything in his previous knowledge. It was the voice of a crazed
+and debased passion. To Lee, it seemed to strip him of his whiteness,
+his continence, his integrity, to flay him of every particle of
+restraint and decency, and set him, bestial and exposed, in a ball room
+with glass-hung chandeliers.
+
+Incomprehensibly the fluctuating clamor--he could distinguish low
+pitched drums--brought him the vision, pale and remote and mysteriously
+smiling, of Cytherea. He thought of that torrential discord rising
+around her belled purple skirt, the cool yellow of her waist crossed
+with fragile lace, beating past her lifted slender hand, the nails
+stained with vermilion, to the pointed oval of her face against the
+black hair and streaming gold of the headdress. Nothing, it appeared,
+could be farther apart than the muffled furious strains escaping in
+bursts through the opened windows beyond and the still apparition
+from the tranquility of his Eastlake house. He would have said,
+unhesitatingly, that the formal melody of the eighteenth century,
+of Scarlatti and harpsichords, was the music that best accompanied
+Cytherea. But she dominated, haunted with her grace, the infernal
+dinning sound of unspeakable defilements. Savina was racked beyond
+endurance:
+
+"I can't stand it any longer," she told Lee hysterically, risen with
+her palms pressed to her ears. "I can hear it with every nerve. It will
+never go out of my brain. You must stop it. Can't you understand that it
+is driving me mad!" Her voice grew so shrill, she trembled so violently,
+that he had to hold her forcibly in his arms. When, toward dawn, it
+ceased, Savina was exhausted; she lay limp and white on her bed;
+and, across the room, he could hear the shallowness of her irregular
+breathing. As a grey light diluted the darkness, the trade wind, the
+night wind, dropped, and the heat palpably increased. Instantaneously
+the sun-flooded morning was born, a morning that lost its freshness,
+its pearly iridescence, immediately. He closed the slats of the balcony
+doors: Savina at last was sleeping, with her countenance, utterly spent,
+turned to him. The sharp cries of the newsboys, the street vendors,
+were drowned in the full sweep of a traffic moving to the blasts of
+multitudinous horns. When she woke, past ten, drinking the small cup of
+black coffee which locally accompanied dressing, she was still shaken.
+"That's the most cursed racket anyone ever had to endure!" A growing
+irritation made harsh his voice. "You couldn't torment a worse sound
+out of a thousand cats." She smiled wanly. "If we were like that in the
+past," he added, "I'm glad we changed, even if we are worse in other
+ways."
+
+"I could hear myself screaming and screaming," Savina said. In the
+heated room she had an uncontrollable chill. "Lee, I can't bring myself
+to tell you: something black and dreadful ... had me. There was no one
+else. It was like a woods. The hands ripping at me--" With her face
+buried in her embroidered pillow, half clothed in web-like garments
+threaded with black ribbons, she cowered in an abject and pitiful agony.
+
+Later, he discovered that, within the scope of his possible knowledge,
+his conjecture had been right: a danzon, a native Cuban ball--not,
+the director of the Inglaterra gave him to understand, entirely
+respectable--had been held in the Opera House. "But there won't be
+another until after we leave," Lee reassured Savina; "they are rather
+rare except at carnival." She shuddered. It was evident that the
+distressing effect on her of the music lingered through the day;
+her energy gave way to a passive contentment hardly removed from
+listlessness.
+
+They drove, at the end of afternoon, on the Malecon, following the
+curving sea wall from La Punta to the scattered villas of Vedado. The
+sea and sky were grey; or was it blue? At the horizon they met without
+a perceptible change; the water became the air, the air water, with
+a transition as gradual as the edge of dusk. The tropical evening was
+accomplished rapidly, as dramatically as the uprush of the sun: they
+were gazing into the distance over a tide like a smooth undulating mist
+... and there were lights crowning the Cabanas fortress; the passing
+cars made the familiar geometrical patterns with the cold bars of their
+lamps; they were wrapped in darkness; night had come.
+
+Savina didn't want to go back to the hotel, their room; and, after
+dinner at the Paris, they went to Carmelo, where they alternated
+northern dances with the stridor of a northern cabaret and drinks.
+Savina's spirits revived slowly. To Lee she seemed to have changed in
+appearance since she left New York--here, losing her air of a constant
+reserve, she looked younger, daring. Her sharp grace, exposed in the
+films of summer dress, had an aspect of belonging, rather than to the
+character she had deserted, to a woman at once conscious of its effect
+and not unwilling to have it measured by the appraising gaze of the
+masculine public. In a way, without losing her distinction, she had
+become evident; another woman, one less admirably balanced, would have
+been conspicuous. Havana was like a, stage on which Savina--with a
+considered bravado they had kept the Randon--tried with intoxicating
+success a part she had long and secretly desired.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+What, Lee found, he most enjoyed was the personal liberty he had first
+experienced in New York, waiting to see Savina after he had definitely
+left Eastlake. All the aspects of his circumferential existence,
+island-like in the dividing indigo of a magic sea, pleased him equally.
+Of course, without Savina Cuba would have been an impossibility; she
+was the center, the motive, of the design of his emotions; but it was
+surprising how contented he was strolling in the outskirts, in the
+minor parks and glorietas and paseos, of the world of his passionate
+adventure. He sat placidly in the Cortina de Valdez, looking across the
+narrow water to the long pink wall of the Cabanas, while Savina
+drove and shopped and rested. Carefully avoiding the Americans at the
+Inglaterra, on the streets, he had no burden of empty mutual assurances,
+the forced stupidities of conversations, to support. His days all had
+the look of a period of rest after a strain of long duration.
+
+The strain, he realized, unknown to him at the time, had existed
+negatively through years before he had grown openly rebellious. A
+quality within him, in spite of him, had risen and swept him, under
+the eyes of Cytherea, beyond every circumstance of his former life.
+The resemblance between her and Savina he caught in fleet glances
+which defied his efforts to summon them; and, where that similitude was
+concerned, he was aware of a disconcerting, almost humiliating, shifting
+of balance. At first, recognizing aspects of Cytherea in Savina, now in
+Cytherea he merely found certain qualities of the woman. The doll, it
+seemed, had not been absorbed in Savina; the distant inanimate object
+was more real than the actual straining arms about his neck, the
+insatiable murmur at his ear. Yet his happiness with Savina was
+absolute, secure; and still totally different from her attitude toward
+him. She often repeated, in a voice no longer varying from her other
+impassioned speech, that she loved him; and, while this was a phrase, a
+reassurance, no man in his situation could escape, he returned it in a
+manner not wholly ringing with conviction.
+
+It was the old difficulty--he wasn't sure, he couldn't satisfy himself,
+about its meaning. He was not, for example, lost beyond knowledge or
+perception in his feeling for Savina; carried along in the tempestuous
+flood of her emotion, he yet had time to linger over and enjoy the
+occurrences by the way. He liked each day for itself, and she regarded
+it only as an insignificant detail of their unity. All her planning, her
+dress and ardor and moods, were directed to one never-lost-sight-of end;
+but he disposed his attention in a hundred channels. Lee began to be
+aware of the tremendous single economy of women, the constant bending
+back of their instincts to a single preeminent purpose.
+
+Yet everywhere, now, women had concentrated in a denial of that: the men
+he knew hadn't a monopoly of restlessness. Even Fanny, in the parading
+of all her rings, had not been oblivious of it. But it wasn't so much
+that women denied their fundamental urgency as it was that they wanted
+it exercised under other, more rapturous, conditions. Inexplicably, and
+a great many at once, women had grown aware of the appalling difference
+between what they might demand and what they had been receiving. In
+consequence of this the world of masculine complacency was being dealt
+some rude blows. But Lee Randon couldn't hope to go into this; the
+problem was sufficiently complicated from his side of the fence. There
+were, immediately, the practical developments of his undertaking to be
+met. He served nothing by putting them off. He must write, but through
+his lawyers, to William Grove and find out what action he proposed
+to take, what arrangements for divorce could be facilitated. A
+letter--there could be no saving impersonality here--to Fanny was more
+difficult.
+
+From Havana, his approval of Fanny was very complete; he understood
+her, made allowances, now better than at any time during their marriage;
+given what, together, they were, her conduct had been admirable. A
+remarkably attractive and faithful woman, he told himself; it was a pity
+that, in her estimation, her good qualities had come to so little. The
+thing for him to do was to see his brother, and move part of the burden
+of his decisions over to Daniel's heavy frame.
+
+The sugar estate of which he was Administrador was in the Province of
+Camagüey, at Cobra; an overnight trip from Havana, Lee had learned. It
+was Sunday evening now, and they would have to give up their room at the
+Inglaterra Tuesday. Obviously there wasn't time to write Daniel and
+have a reply by then. The other desirable hotels were as full as the
+Inglaterra. He must wire, but the composition of his telegram presented
+an unexpected difficulty:
+
+Lee didn't know how to explain the presence with him of Savina; he
+couldn't determine how much or how little to say; and it was probable
+that Daniel had had a cable from Eastlake. The mere putting down of the
+necessary words of his message, under the concerned gaze of a clerk,
+with a limited comprehension of English, was hazardous. The clerk,
+he had discovered, would read in a loud voice of misplaced linguistic
+confidence whatever Lee wrote, and there was a small assemblage of
+Americans at the counter of a steamship company across the office. What,
+it began to appear, they'd have to do would be to take the train
+for Cobra on Tuesday. Yet they couldn't quite come down on Daniel so
+unexpectedly; he lived, Lee recalled, on a batey, the central dominating
+point of a sugar estate; and--unmarried--what accommodations he might
+offer were problematic. Lee, from the heading of a letter, could not
+build the proportions of a Casa Vivienda. Well, there would be a hotel
+at Cobra! That answered his doubts--Savina and he would go to Cobra and
+there communicate with Daniel. It would be easy to talk privately with
+him. Lee didn't want his approval, but only his careful opinions and
+reasonable assistance.
+
+He, Lee, would not produce Savina with the triumphant indication that
+her resistless charm explained everything. He was no such fatuous fool!
+But, studying her, he got a solid assurance from the superiority of her
+person. Daniel would see at once that this wasn't the usual flight south
+of an indulgence headed for paresis. Savina, his entire affair, demanded
+a dignified reception. They were seated in the patio of the hotel, by a
+pool and the heroic bronze statue of a dancing girl in a manton; on the
+table between them was, at that hour, the inevitable small pitcher of
+Daiquiri cocktails. He told Savina what had been in his thoughts, and
+she nodded her approval:
+
+"I agree that we ought to see your brother, and, through him,
+communicate with New York. At present things are much too uncertain. If
+William, or your wife, were different they could have us held on a very
+unpleasant-sounding charge. I know you detest conventions, but I must
+say I am glad other people live by them; it makes it so comfortable for
+us. Imagine, if William were a vulgar man, the fuss! But," she admitted,
+"at bottom I shouldn't have cared. You are not half as disreputable as I
+am, Lee. You have a proper look at this minute."
+
+"Really," he protested, "there is no reason for you to be insulting,
+when I deliberately led you astray."
+
+"You do flatter yourself," Savina replied; "when it was I all the time:
+I broke up your home."
+
+"You needn't boast so loudly and pain everyone about us," he protested
+cheerfully. She gazed contemptuously at the surrounding tables:
+
+"The scheming presidents of concessions and their fat wives. Have you
+noticed the men hurrying away apologetically in the evening, Lee? The
+places on Sol and Gloria Streets! And, just as you meant, if they knew
+who, what, we were, they'd want to have us arrested. You see, I am
+infringing on the privileges sacred to men. It's all right for them to
+do this, to go out to an appointment after ten o'clock and come back at
+two satisfied--"
+
+"Savina," he interrupted her, "I know all that you were going to say, I
+could repeat it to you in your own words. You were about to assault the
+double standard. Consider it done. You are right. Everyone with sense
+is right there. But if I hear it again I'll think I am at Aeolian Hall
+listening to an English author lecture. I'll put you in your car on
+Forty-second Street and send you home."
+
+"You can't send me home," she reminded him; "you are too proper and
+have too many scruples. You'll have to stay with me now for life. I am
+ruined." They laughed happily.
+
+"You are," he echoed her.
+
+"Isn't it nice?"
+
+"Nothing better could be invented."
+
+She investigated the pitcher. "The last drop."
+
+Lee Randon signalled for the waiter, but she stopped him; the strained
+intensity of her face, the shining darkness of her eyes, set his heart
+pounding.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+They left for Cobra without even the formality of a telegraphed
+announcement to Daniel Randon. Their compartment, in the middle of the
+car, with the more casual open accommodations at either end, resolute
+in its bare varnished coolness, indicated what degree of heat they might
+expect in the interior. The progress of the train through the length of
+the island was slow and irregular: Lee had a sense of insecure tracks,
+of an insufficient attention to details of transportation that required
+an endless, untiring oversight. Naturally they slept badly; and the
+morning showed them a wide plain scattered with royal palms which
+thickened in the distance. Such vast groves, Lee thought, robbed them
+of the stateliness so impressive in parks and cities. The landscape,
+tangled with lianas or open about massive and isolated ceiba trees, was
+without the luxuriance of color he had expected. It was evident that
+there had been no rain for a long period; and the crowded growths, grey
+rather than green, were monotonous, oppressive. Other than Apollinaris
+and the conventional black coffee of the train, and oranges bought
+by Lee at a junction, no breakfast was possible; and they watched
+uninterruptedly the leisurely passing land. Marks of sugar planting
+multiplied, the cane, often higher than Lee's head, was cut into
+sections by wide lanes; and announced by a sickly odor of fermentation,
+he saw, with a feeling of disappointment, the high corrugated iron sides
+of a grinding mill. It was without any saving picturesque quality; and
+the noise of its machinery, a heavy crushing rumble, was perceptible on
+the train.
+
+However, Savina was attracted by the high carts, on two solid wheels,
+and drawn by four or six oxen, hauling the cut cane. But the villages
+they passed, single streets of unrelieved squalor in a dusty waste, they
+decided were immeasurably depressing. No one who could avoid it walked;
+lank men in broad straw hats and coat-like shirts rode meagre horses
+with the sheaths of long formidable blades slapping their miserable
+hides. Groups of fantastically saddled horses drooped their heads tied
+in the vicinity of a hands-breadth of shade by general stores. "I could
+burst into tears," Savina declared. But he showed her pastures of rich
+tufted grass with herds of well-conditioned cattle. "I wish we were
+there," she said. But, when the train stopped at Cobra, Savina,
+hesitating on the step, proposed that they go on into Camagüey, hardly
+more than an hour distant.
+
+Their bags, put off, the rapid incomprehensible speech of the guard,
+left them, with the train moving doubtfully on, at Cobra. It was, on
+examination, more dismal than, from the detachment of the compartment,
+they had realized. The usual baked ground, the dusty underbrush, the
+blank façades of the low buildings that faced them from either side
+of the tracks, had--in addition to a supreme ugliness--an indefinably
+threatening air. The rawness, the machetes hanging about the booted
+heels of soiled idlers, the presence everywhere of negroes with an
+unrestrained curiosity in Lee and his companion, filled him with an
+instinctive antagonism. "Do you think that can be the hotel?" he asked,
+indicating a long plaster building with a shallow upper porch supported
+on iron-footed wooden columns. Above its closely-shuttered windows, in
+letters faded and blistered by the sun, reached the description, "Hotel
+de Cobra."
+
+"We can't stay there," he continued decidedly; "I'll send for Daniel at
+once."
+
+Without available help he carried their bags to the entrance of the
+hotel, and went into a darkened room with a cement floor which had the
+thick dampness of an interior saturated with spilled acid wine. There
+he found a man, not different from those outside, who, incapable of
+understanding English, managed to grasp the fact that Lee wished to see
+Daniel Randon immediately. The proprietor assented, and urged them up
+a stair. "I won't have you wait out here," Lee told Savina; "it will be
+only for an hour or so." The room into which they were ushered had,
+at least, the advantage of bareness: there was a wardrobe of mahogany
+leaning precariously forward, a double bed deeply sagged with a
+grey-white covering, a wash stand and tin basin and pitcher, and some
+short sturdy rush-bottomed chairs.
+
+Its principal feature, however, was the blue paint that covered the
+walls, a blue of a particularly insistent shade which, in the solidity
+of its expanse, seemed to make all the enclosed space and objects livid.
+The tall shutters on one side, Lee discovered, opened on the upper porch
+and a prospect of the tracks beyond. "If I stayed here a night I'd
+be raving," Savina declared. "Lee, such a color! And the place, the
+people--did you notice that carriageful of black women that went by us
+along the street? There were only three, but they were so loosely fat
+that they filled every inch. Their faces were drenched with powder and
+you could see their revolting breasts through their muslin dresses;
+terrible creatures reeking with unspeakable cologne. They laughed at me,
+cursed us, I am sure."
+
+"We'll have to put up with it till Daniel comes," he observed
+philosophically; and, on the low straight chairs, they gazed around so
+disgustedly that they both laughed. "I suppose he is out somewhere in
+the cane." Savina asked what they would do if he were away. He might
+be in Santiago. The company had other estates. "Not now," Lee decided;
+"what they call the grinding season has just begun, and every hour is
+important. The least thing gone wrong might cost thousands of dollars."
+The correctness of his assumption was upheld by an announcement
+unintelligible except for the comforting fact that Daniel was below.
+
+"Perhaps I had better see him first," Lee suggested diplomatically, and
+Savina assented.
+
+Daniel Randon was both tall and fat, a slow impressive bulk in white
+linen with a smooth impassive face and considering brown eyes. "This,"
+he said unremarkably, "is a surprise. But I am, of course, glad;
+particularly since Venalez reported that Fanny was with you."
+
+"She isn't," Lee replied tersely; there had been no cable from Eastlake,
+he saw, and he must plunge boldly into what he had to say. "I am sorry
+to tell you that she is at home. But I'm here, and not by myself."
+A slight expression of annoyance twitched at his brother's contained
+mouth. "No, you are making a mistake. I have left Fanny, Daniel. I
+thought perhaps you would have heard."
+
+"Our telegraph system is undependable," was all that the other, the
+younger, Randon answered.
+
+"You don't know, then. A Mrs. Grove is with me; but she is that only
+until the divorces can be arranged; and I counted on you--"
+
+"Divorces?" The single word was accompanied by a faint lifting of
+Daniel's eyebrows.
+
+"She was married, too," Lee explained. "You will understand better when
+you talk to Savina. We are not young feather-heads, Daniel; this is
+serious, final. Really, we came to Cuba on your account, to see you.
+When I tried to compose a telegram from Havana, telling you something of
+the situation, I couldn't--all the idiotic tourists hanging about! Well,
+here we are, or here I am, and Savina is upstairs, most anxious to meet
+you."
+
+"Certainly," Daniel Randon agreed. He was silent for a moment in the
+consideration of what he had been told. Then, "I can't have you on
+the batey," he pronounced. He lifted a silencing hand against an
+anger forming in instant unmeasured speech. "Not for myself," he
+particularized. "You could have seven mistresses, of all colors, if the
+place were mine. Please remember that it isn't. It's the company's. That
+is quite different." Daniel was making, Lee realized, what for him was
+a tremendous conversational effort. "Even if I were alone, except for
+Cubans, it would be possible; but there is Mr. Stribling, with his
+wife and, at present, grown daughter, from Utica; he is the Assistant
+Administrador. Then we have George Vincent and Katharine--the Chief
+Engineer with a very new bride from, I believe, Ohio. They are very
+particular in Ohio. And others. You must remember that I have a
+photograph of Fanny with the children: it is much admired, well known. I
+couldn't explain your Mrs.--Mrs. Grove. Who could? We haven't a
+sister. Altogether I am sorry." He stopped uncompromisingly; yet, Lee
+recognized, in all that Daniel had said there was no word of criticism
+or gratuitous advice. He had voiced the facts only as they related to
+him; to everything else he gave the effect of a massive blankness.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+Argument, Lee saw, was useless. Extended to the heart of a tropical
+island, the virtuous indignations of a hard propriety still bound their
+movements. "All that I can suggest," Daniel went on, "is that you return
+to Havana tomorrow evening; the company has offices there, and it will
+be easier for me to see you. Camagüey is nearer, but gossip there
+would have you in the same bed no matter how far apart your rooms were.
+Decidedly not Camagüey."
+
+There was no train for Havana, it developed, before tomorrow. "And,
+in the meanwhile," Lee inquired, "must we stay here? Savina will be
+miserable."
+
+"Why not?" Daniel gazed about casually. "I lived with Venalez a month.
+It is good enough if you are not too strict about a travelling beauty or
+two who may be stopping as well." His apologies to Savina, in the room
+above, were faultless. There was, simply, at the Cobra sugar estancia,
+no satisfactory arrangement for guests; except for an occasional party
+of directors, or a special mission, there were no guests. At his,
+Daniel's central, in Santa Clara on the sea, he hoped some day to offer
+them the hospitality of his own house.
+
+When he left, Lee made no revelation of what had been said downstairs;
+Savina accepted the situation as it had been exposed to her. "I can't
+allow myself to think of a night here," she told him; "it will be a
+horror." She opened the slats of the long window shutters, and glowing
+bars of white heat fell in a ladder-like order across a blue wall; the
+segments of sunlight were as sharp and solid as incandescent metal. In
+the cobalt shadow Savina was robbed of her vitality; she seemed unreal;
+as she passed through the vivid projected rays of midday it appeared as
+though they must shine uninterruptedly through her body. Lee considered
+the advisability of taking her for a walk--there were, he had seen
+from the train, no roads here for driving--but, recalling the insolent
+staring and remarks she had met, he was forced to drop that possibility.
+
+Weary from the prolonged wakefulness of the night, Savina made an effort
+to sleep; and, waiting until she was measurably quiet, Lee went out. The
+heat was blinding, it walled him in, pressed upon him with a feeling of
+suffocation, as though--between him and the freshness, the salvation, of
+any air--there were miles of it packed around him like grey cotton. To
+the left of the hotel, the bare plaza, half hidden in scrubby bushes,
+there was an extended shed with a number of doors and fragments of
+fence, heaped rusted tins and uncovered garbage; and, lounging in the
+openings, the door-frames often empty, the windows without sashes, were
+women, scantily covered, sounding every note in a scale from black to
+white. Yet, Lee observed, the whitest were, essentially, black. What
+amazed, disturbed, him was their indolent blinking indifference, their
+indecent imperviousness, in the full blaze of day.
+
+They were, to Lee, significant, because from them he drew a knowledge
+of Cobra. He could not, without such assistance, have arrived at the
+instinctive understanding that interpreted the street into which he
+turned. It was the street of a delirium, running, perhaps, for half a
+mile; an irregular deeply rutted way formed by its double row of small
+unsubstantial buildings of raw or gaudily painted boards and galvanized
+sheet iron. They were all completely open at the front, with their
+remarkable contents, pandemoniums of merchandise, exposed upon a
+precarious sidewalk of uneven parallel boards elevated two or three feet
+above the road. Mostly cafés, restaurants, there was still an incredible
+number of banks--mere shells with flat tarred roofs and high counters
+built from wall to wall. The receivers, the paying tellers, were many,
+with the mingled bloods, the heterogeneous characteristics, of China
+and Colonial Spain and Africa; and, back of their activity--there was a
+constant rush of deposited money and semi-confidential discussion--were
+safes so ponderous and ancient that they might have contained the
+treasure of a plate fleet of Peru.
+
+Crowding in on them, challenging each other from opposite sides, the
+restaurants were longer and shallow, with their groups of tables ranged
+against walls decorated in appallingly primitive and savage designs:
+palms like crawling spiders of verdigris set on columns of chocolate
+rose from shores, from seas, of liquid bright muds in which grotesque
+caricatures of men, barbarously clad or, swollen headed, in travesties
+of civilized garb, faced women with exaggerated and obscene anatomies.
+They, like the banks, were crowded; companies of negroes sat over dishes
+of mucous consistency and drank, with thick lips, liquors of vicious
+dyes. The prodigious women, often paler than the men, drinking with
+them, gabbled in a loud and corrupt Spanish and, without hats on
+their sere crinkled masses of hair, were unrestrained in displays of
+calculated or emotionally demented excitement.
+
+A flat wagon passed, holding, on precarious chairs, a band furiously
+playing an infernal jumbled music which, as it swelled, filled all the
+occupants of the cafés with a twitching hysteria. Subdued masculine
+shouts were pierced by shameless feminine cries; lust and rage and
+nameless intoxications quivered like the perceptible films of hot dust
+on the air. Negroes, Haitians with the flattened skulls, the oily skin,
+of the Gold Coast, and Jamaicans glowing with a subcutaneous redness,
+thronged the sidewalks; and sharp-jawed men, with a burned indeterminate
+superiority of race, riding emaciated horses, added to the steel of
+their machetes revolvers strapped on their long thighs.
+
+What, mainly, occupied Lee Randon was the nakedness of the passion
+everywhere surcharging the surface of life. There was, in the sense
+familiar to him, no restraint, no cover beyond the casual screens at the
+backs of the restaurants; no accident to which the uncertain material of
+life was subject was improbable; murder rasped, like the finger of death
+on wire strings, at the exasperated sensibilities of organisms exposed,
+without preparation, to an incomprehensible state of life a million
+years beyond their grasp. It fascinated and disturbed Lee: it had a
+definite interest, a meaning, for him. Was it to this that Savina had
+turned? Had the world only in the adherence to the duty typified by
+Fanny left such a morass as he saw about him? Was he, Lee Randon,
+instead of advancing, falling back into a past more remote than coherent
+speech? Nothing, he asserted, could be further from his intention and
+hope. Yet, without doubt, he was surrounded by the denial of order, of
+disciplined feeling; and, flatly, it terrified him.
+
+Lee insisted, hastily, that what he wanted--no, demanded--was not this
+destruction of responsibility, a chaos, mentally and sensually, but the
+removal of it as a rigid mob imposition on the higher discretion of his
+individuality. The thing which, with Savina, he had assaulted was, in
+its way, as unfortunate as the single reeking street of Cobra. Again,
+the scene around him wasn't hypocritical, its intention was as
+thickly evident as the rice powder on the black sweating faces of the
+prostitutes. Hypocrisy was peculiarly the vice of civilization. His
+necessity was an escape from either fate--the defilement of a pandering
+to the flesh and the waste of a negation with neither courage nor
+rapture. Damn it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into the
+other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave permanently
+the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't necessary to
+go down into the bottoms, the mire.
+
+He regarded himself curiously as, to a large extent, the result of all
+the ages that had multiplied since the heated tropics held the early
+fecundity of human life. A Haitian lunged by with out-turned palms
+hanging at his knees, a loose jaw dropped on a livid gullet flecked
+with white, and a sultry inner consciousness no more than a germinal
+superstition visible in fixed blood--suffused eyes. He had an odor, Lee
+fantastically thought, of stale mud. Well--there he was and there
+was Lee Randon, and the difference between them was the sum of almost
+countless centuries of religions and states and sacrifice and slaughter
+He had a feeling that the accomplishment was ludicrously out of
+proportion to all that had gone into it. For the only thing of value,
+the security of a little knowledge, was still denied him. What, so
+tragically long ago, Africa begged from the mystery of night, from idols
+painted indifferently with ochre or blood, he was demanding from a power
+which had lost even the advantage of visibility. His superiority was
+negligible. It was confined relatively to unimportant things--such as
+an abstract conception of a universe partly solid and partly composed of
+ignited gases revolving in an infinity of time and space. He was aware
+of sensations, flavors, champagnes, more delicate than the brutality of
+a rape conceived in strangling gulps of sugar cane rum. On the outside
+he had been bleached, deodorized, made conformable with chairs rather
+than allowed to retain the proportions, powers, designed for the
+comfortable holding to branches. But in his heart, in what he thought of
+as his spirit, what had he gained, where--further than being temporarily
+with Savina in the beastly hotel of Cobra--was he?
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+His thoughts had become so inappropriate to his purpose, his presence,
+here that he banished them and returned to Savina. She was notably more
+cheerful than when he had left her, and was engaged with an omelet,
+rough bread, Scotch preserved strawberries, and a bottle of Marquis de
+Riscal; most of which, she told him, had been sent, together with
+other pleasant things, by Daniel Randon. She was unusually seductive in
+appearance, with, over the sheer embroidered beauty of her underclothes,
+her graceful silken knees, a floating unsubstantial wrap like crushed
+handfuls of lilacs. "This room kills anything I might put on," she
+replied to the expression of his pleasure. "After all, we shall soon be
+gone. I got Daniel's servant to telegraph the Inglaterra we were coming
+back. They'll have to watch out for us. After we see your brother there,
+and make a beginning of our rearrangements, we will go on, I think. Do
+you mind? South, Guadeloupe, perhaps, because it's so difficult to get
+to, and then Brazil. I have an idea we won't stay there long, either,
+but travel on toward the East. I do like islands, and there are
+quantities, quarts, to see in the Pacific." She put her arms, from which
+the wide sleeves fell back, around his neck, drew him close to her. "It
+doesn't matter where I am, if it is with you. I love you, Lee, and I am
+happy because I know we'll always have each other. We are not so very
+young, you see, and there isn't a great deal of time left, not enough to
+grow tired, to change in.
+
+"I wake up at night, sometimes, with that tiresome pain at my heart, as
+though it were too full of you, and, for a little, I'm confused--it is
+all so strange. I think, for a moment, that I am still with William,
+and I can't imagine what has happened to the room. It frightens me
+dreadfully, and then I remember: it isn't William and the house on
+Sixty-sixth Street, but you, Lee, and Cuba. We're together with nothing
+in the world to spoil our joy. And, when we are old, we shall sit side
+by side at Etretat, I am sure, and watch the sea, and the young people
+in love under the gay marquees, and remember. Then we'll be married and
+more respectable than the weather-vanes. I want that on your account;
+I don't care; but you would worry, I am afraid. You are serious and a
+conscientious man, Lee.
+
+"But, before that, I want to spend all my feeling, I don't want a thrill
+left, lost; I want to empty and exhaust myself." Her emotion was
+so strong that it drew her away from him, erect, with her bare arms
+reaching to their fullest quivering length. In the blue gloom of the
+room shuttered against the white day, with her wrap, the color of
+lilacs, lightly clasping her shoulders, she seemed to be a vision in
+subdued paint. Lee was held motionless, outside, by the fervor of an
+appeal to fate rather than to him. She was, the thought recurred to him,
+too slender, fragile, to contain such a passion. Then, in a transition
+so sudden that it bewildered him, her mouth was against his, her hands
+straining him to her. She was ugly then, her face was unrecognizable in
+an expression of paralysed fury.
+
+The heat, Lee protested, grew worse with evening; not a stir of air
+brought out the dry scraping rustle of the palms, a sound like the
+friction of thin metal plates. The balcony, if possible, was worse than
+their room. In his irritation Lee cursed the scruples of his brother;
+Savina, prostrate on the bed, said nothing. At intervals her hand moved,
+waving a paper fan with a printed idyl from Boucher, given her in a
+café at Havana. She had none of the constrained modesty, the sense
+of discomfort at her own person, so dominating in Fanny. Lee finally
+lighted a lamp: the hours, until the precipitant onrush of night, seemed
+stationary; gigantic moths fluttered audibly about the illumination and
+along the dim ceiling. When, later, he was on the bed, it was wet under
+his sweating body. In a passing sleep Savina gave one of the cries of
+her waking emotion. In a state of unconsciousness her fingers reached
+toward him. From the balcony beyond them drifted a woman's challenging
+laughter--one of the travelling beauties Daniel had mentioned--and he
+could hear the bursts of discordant sound on the street of Cobra, the
+combined efforts of rival bands hideous singly and together beyond
+description. What a hell of a night, what a night in hell!
+
+The moths, defrauded in their hunger for light, blundered softly around
+the walls; when Lee rose to light a cigarette they would, he felt,
+gather at the match and beat it out with their desirous wings. Then
+he heard a shot, and uplifted clamoring voices; all as unreal, as
+withdrawn, as a simulated murder on a distant stage. He pictured the
+flaring restaurants, the banks with corrugated iron locked across their
+fronts; the faces of the negroes brought black and lurid out of the
+surrounding blackness. Savina, awake, demanded a drink, and he held a
+clay water monkey awkwardly to her lips. The faint double blast of a
+steam signal rose at the back of the hotel, beyond the town; he had
+heard it before and now connected it with Daniel's sugar mill.
+
+His brother hadn't perceptibly changed in fifteen years. During that
+time Lee had seen him scarcely at all. Suddenly he was sorry for this:
+Daniel was what was generally known as a strong man. Men deep in the
+national finances of their country spoke to Lee admiringly of him; it
+was conceded that he was a force. Lee wasn't interested in that--in his
+brother's ability, it might be, to grip an industry by the throat.
+He envied, speculated about, the younger man's calmness, the Chinese
+quality of his silence, the revelations of his carefully few words.
+Daniel, in past years, had been often drunk, various women had been
+seriously or lightly associated with his name; but he appeared to have
+cast them, the Bacardi and the blandishments, entirely aside. He seemed
+as superior to the dragging and wearing of life as a figure carved in
+stone, a Buddha, any Eastern presentment of the aloof contempt of a
+serene wisdom at the mountain of its own flesh. Lee, beside his brother,
+resembled a whirlpool of dust temporarily formed by the wind in a road.
+
+Daniel had never married, he had been too cunning for that fragrant
+trap, as well. What were his vices? But were habits, self-indulgences,
+held in the background, ruthlessly subordinated to primary activity,
+vices? Lee wished now that Daniel had seen Cytherea; he was certain that
+the other would have said something valuable about her. Through his long
+contact with the naked tropics Daniel understood many things hidden from
+him. He must know, for instance, about the Brujeria, the negro magic
+brought through Haiti from the depths of Africa. Everyone in Cuba caught
+rumors, hints, of ceremonials of abject horror. But of that Daniel could
+never be brought to speak. Lee could even visualize him taking part, in
+a cold perverse curiosity, in the dances about smothered fires.
+
+He thought there was a glimmer of day at the windows, but it was only
+a flash across his staring eyeballs. From the plaza below came a low
+sibilant conversation. It went on and on, until Lee, in an irrepressible
+indignation, went out on the balcony and, in a voice like the clapping
+of a broken iron bell, cursed the talkers into silence.
+
+Christ, it was hot!
+
+Savina was sitting up. "Isn't it tomorrow night, or the one after that?"
+she asked. "This room is like a vault that I have been in a thousand
+thousand years. I can't tell you how it affects me; it seems as though I
+must stay here forever, that if I tried to get away I'd be forced
+back. And I dreamed that everything I owned had been turned blue--my
+nightgowns and nail files and travelling clock and the oranges. You
+wouldn't believe how depressing a blue orange could be. We will forget
+it as soon as possible, Lee. Do you remember how nice the room was at
+the Inglaterra? I wish you'd feel my head: isn't it hotter than usual?"
+
+"Why shouldn't it be?" he asked impolitely.
+
+"It wouldn't be possible, would it, Lee, to have the night go on
+forever, to have something happen to the scheme of things? Or perhaps
+I'm blind." Her voice was plainly terrified. "Light a match, please. Oh,
+thank you. What an idiot I am. Hold me closer; then I can forget, then
+nothing else matters. I can never get close enough; I wish I could pour
+myself into you."
+
+"You'll be able to, if this keeps up," he observed, with a note of
+brutality. "They will find us, in the morning, in a bowl and two
+pitchers."
+
+But there was no corresponding lightness in his spirit; periods like
+this extended into an infinity of torment beyond time. A thinning of the
+dark expanded through the room. A cerulean unnatural dawn crept about
+him: there was the muffled clatter of horses' hoofs in the dust outside;
+a locomotive whistled in a far universal key. Savina slowly became
+visible; asleep, her personality, her vividness, were gone; she was as
+featureless, as pallid, as a nameless marble of remote Greece. There
+were marks across her feet where the mules chafed her; the mules
+themselves were lying on the bare floor. He saw his clothes, the
+familiar habit of the day, with a sharp surprise.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+It had been a night without rest, without the coolness and assuagement
+of a release from the fever of the day; and, Lee thought, he felt as
+haggard as Savina looked. A wind that was hardly more than an erratic
+stirring of super-heated dust agitated a loose slat in a shutter and
+deposited a fine dun film across the floor. Savina put as much as
+possible, so early, into her bags. Standing before a narrow mirror
+nailed to a wall, with her comb, she turned. "My hair is soaked," she
+wailed; "just putting my arms up is more than I can manage. Haven't you
+been thinking about all the cold things in the world?" She slipped into
+a chair, spent and dejected, with her hair clouding one shoulder. It
+would, he repeated, be over soon, and he gazed at her with a veiled
+inspection. Savina was so entirely unprepared for this, the least
+hardship so new, that he was uncertain about the temper of her
+resistance.
+
+Aware of his gaze, she smiled slowly at him, and, seated, again took
+up her task with the comb. "I couldn't have you see me very often like
+this," she proceeded: "it would be fatal. I don't mean that when I'm
+finished I'm irresistible, but the process simply must go on in private.
+I don't want to be a wife, Lee--one of those creatures in a dressing
+sacque with hair pins in her mouth. I can't bear the thought of you and
+a flannel petticoat together. That is where married women make a serious
+mistake: they let their husbands see them while the maid is doing their
+hair, or when they're smeared with creams, or, maybe, with tonsilitis."
+She rose. "I won't be a wife," she chanted, "I won't be--"
+
+Her voice broke suddenly. Lee thought she had tripped, he lunged
+forward, but she fell crumpling on the floor. "It's this hellish heat,"
+he asserted, lifting her to the bed. Her lips were open and dry, and
+her eyes, without vision, stared at the ceiling. Lee wet a handkerchief,
+dabbling it over her face; he had never before, he realized, seen a
+woman faint. It was terrifying but not grave; they did it, he had heard,
+very often. No wonder, after such a night. She had been gone over a
+minute now; there must be someone in the place who would know what to
+do. He put off moving, however, both because of his reluctance to leave
+Savina alone and because of the difficulty of any explanation. He took
+her hand; it was cold and damp, and her forehead was glistening with
+minute globes of sweat. All the blood seemed to have been withdrawn from
+her body.
+
+"I'll have to go for help," he said aloud, in a commonplace manner which
+yet struck curiously on his hearing. There was a faint quiver of her
+features, a scarcely perceptible sigh, and her fingers weakly closed on
+his grasp. "How foolish," Savina murmured. She made an effort to raise
+herself up from the pillow, but he restrained her; Lee commanded her to
+be absolutely still. "The spirits of ammonia is in the dressing-case,"
+she whispered. He held the clouding aromatic liquid to her mouth and she
+took it laboriously. "Don't call anyone, Lee," she continued; "I'll be
+all right in a little. So much at once! You see, I haven't been used to
+happiness. No wonder I was dizzy. But I fainted, Lee, didn't I? That's
+unusual for me."
+
+He sat beside her, at once moved and detached from her weakness,
+gently holding her supine hand. She mustn't worry, he told her at short
+intervals. "Don't worry, this is nothing."
+
+"You'll give me time to dress for the train," she insisted. "As soon as
+we get away from here I shall be better. We will, won't we?"
+
+"Get away? What nonsense! Of course. You will be up by noon, but there
+is no good in your stirring before you have to. If Daniel comes, you can
+see him here, in your bed. Or you needn't see him at all. It's just as
+you feel."
+
+Even as she lay, prostrate, on the bed, he could see her collapse; the
+strength, animation, interest, drained away from her; it seemed to Lee
+that momentarily she was again in a coma. He leaned over and placed
+a hand on her brow. Savina's eye-lids fluttered. Under her breast her
+heart was scarcely discernible. Suddenly he didn't like it; abruptly
+an apprehension, from which he was obliged to bar a breath of panic,
+possessed him. Lee covered her lightly with a sheet, and went out,
+softly closing the door. Before the hotel he caught the proprietor by a
+shoulder and pointed up to his room. "Sick, sick," he repeated the term
+with increasing emphasis, not successful in banishing his vagueness of
+dismay. The proprietor smiled uncertainly, edging from under the weight
+of Lee's hand. Then, "Get my brother, Mr. Daniel Randon, at once," he
+commanded; "soon. Mr. Randon; the sugar--" Lee waved in the direction of
+the mill.
+
+This the other again comprehended, and Lee saw a youth swing a bare leg
+over a convenient horse and vanish behind the Cobra Hotel. He went back
+to the room: Savina hadn't moved while he had been gone. She seemed
+even weaker--a thing he would have declared impossible--than before.
+He bathed her face and throat in water, and there was a murmur of
+gratitude, of love, so low that, with his ear against her lips, the
+individual words were lost. His disturbance increased and, when the
+heavy firm steps of Daniel Randon had approached on the cement of the
+corridor without, and he had knocked and entered, Lee pointed to the bed
+with an unconcealed anxiety.
+
+Daniel bent over Savina with a comprehensive unmoved regard; he touched
+a cheek, with a surprising delicacy, and then turned and faced Lee. The
+latter said sharply, "She has fainted, but it's only the heat. She'll be
+all right after a rest." As he spoke, more to himself than to Daniel,
+in an effort of private encouragement, what confidence he had dissolved
+before his brother's impassive negation.
+
+"It is more serious than that," Daniel Randon told him. "There is no
+doctor here we can trust, but I'll send a gas rail car into Camagüey for
+Fancett. It will take three hours or worse." He left promptly, closing
+the door soundlessly; and Lee heard his voice from the plaza, not raised
+but intolerantly domineering, issuing orders in a Spanish at once fluent
+and curt.
+
+In the long-dragging succeeding period there was no visible change in
+Savina; at intervals she spoke faintly, there was the dim trace, the
+effort, of a smile; her hand, whenever he released it, slipped away. The
+heat in the room thickened; the barred sunlight cut like white knives at
+the opposite wall; a pungent odor of cooking peppers came in under the
+door. Savina's bags, nearly packed, stood open on chairs; the linen
+suit in which she travelled, the small hat and swathing brown veil,
+were ready by her low darkly polished tan shoes; gloves, still in their
+printed tissue paper, the comb, a small gold bag with an attached chased
+powder box, a handkerchief with a monogram in mauve, were gathered on
+the chest of drawers.
+
+Lee had heard the rail car leave for Camagüey: there had been a series
+of short explosions, first scattered and then blending in a regular
+pulsation soon lost over the vanishing tracks. The interminable
+clip-clip of horses, dreary staccato voices, rose and fell, advanced and
+retreated, outside. But, through all his attentiveness to Savina,
+his crowding thoughts, he listened for the return of the car with the
+doctor. What was his name? Foster, Faucett--no, it was Fancett. An
+American, evidently. "The doctor is coming," he told Savina gently.
+"Daniel felt that he had better see you. From Camagüey. A good man. I
+want to get you out of here at once, and he will give us something."
+Waves of rebellion passed over him, an anger at his impotence, at the
+arbitrary removal of Savina from the sphere of his help. His coat was
+off, his collar unbuttoned, and he rolled up the sleeves of his shirt,
+wet with sweat and the bathing of her head.
+
+To Lee, Savina appeared sunken; her cheeks, certainly, were hollower;
+there was a shadow, like the dust over the floor, in each one; she had
+ceased to open her eyes but they had retreated. A dreadful twenty-four,
+thirty, hours; how brutally hard it had been on her. She hadn't
+complained; he had been more upset, impatient, than Savina. What a
+splendid companion! But that, he irritably felt, was a cold word of
+description for her. What a force! She was that, magnificently, above
+everything else. Beside her, other people--the rest of life--were flat,
+tepid.
+
+There was a thin far vibration which grew into a flowing throb; Lee
+identified it as the rail car. Perhaps the doctor had been absent.
+However, Daniel would know what to do. The footfalls approaching the
+door were multiplied: it was his brother and an elderly wasted man with
+a vermilion sprig of geranium in the lapel of a white coat. He nodded
+to Lee, pressed his hand, and went quickly to the bed. In the stillness
+while Dr. Fancett took Savina's pulse Lee again caught the shallow
+rapidity of her breathing. Daniel Randon stood with a broad planter's
+hat held with the lightness of touch characteristic of him. The man at
+the bed turned a speculative gaze upon Lee.
+
+"Your wife has an acute dilatation of the heart," he pronounced. The
+significance of his unguarded tone shocked Lee immeasurably.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+"But I don't understand that," Lee protested; "she has never had any
+serious trouble with her heart before." He was halted by Daniel's brief
+peculiar scrutiny. The doctor replied that this was not organic. "It may
+be the result of unaccustomed and excessive heat; an accumulation of
+the excessive," he added concisely. "Excesses." The single word followed
+after a hesitation in which Fancett was plainly at a loss. His frowning
+gaze was still bent upon Lee. "I know so little of Mrs. Randon's
+history," he finally said. Daniel naturally had inferred, or perhaps
+the doctor deduced, that Savina and he were married. They would be, in
+a very short while, Lee told himself stubbornly. "You have ice on the
+batey? Yes, at once, please. And a nurse can come from my office on the
+Havana train this evening." Daniel nodded once, in acknowledgment. He
+moved closer to Lee:
+
+"This is serious. You can't, of course, think of going on. I will see
+that she is as comfortable here as she would be with me; everything
+shall be done."
+
+Lee answered that he was certain of that. A feeling of helplessness
+fastened on him, together with the incongruous speculation about the
+propriety of a cable to William Grove. The absurd idea occurred to him
+that Savina had two husbands; each with the right, if he desired, to be
+at a side of her bed, each holding one of her limp hands. He dismissed
+the elaborated thought in a rage at the triviality of his mind. Fancett
+and Daniel had gone temporarily: Lee had heard the former making
+arrangements to stay over night at the sugar estate. Savina's fast
+superficial breathing now dominated the room. He was again seated beside
+her, leaden-hearted and blank.
+
+It was so useless--this illness and suffering, now! The doctor had
+seemed to insinuate that it might be traced to him, Lee Randon. What the
+devil did he mean by that? It was the fault of Daniel, the immobile, as
+much as anyone. In an airy room, under comfortable conditions, probably
+it wouldn't have happened. Savina's suit, her shoes, the bags, hadn't
+been disturbed. There was a faint tightening of her grasp, and he bent
+close, but he distinguished only random words.
+
+"--not sorry. Willing ... with you. Don't be unhappy."
+
+It required an enormous effort, the sound was at once all but
+imperceptible and burdened with an agony of labor. As he watched her he
+saw what, he thought, was an illusion--the blueness of the room, of the
+walls, seemed to settle on her countenance. It increased, her face was
+in tone with the color that had so disturbed her, a vitreous blue too
+intense for realization. He was startled: like a sponge, sopping up the
+atmosphere, she darkened. It was so brutal, so hideous, that he spoke
+involuntarily:
+
+"No one can live blue like that."
+
+Then, with a glance instinct with dread, he saw that he was
+right--Savina had died.
+
+A calm of desperation swept over him. He must tell Daniel and the
+doctor. But they would still need the ice. The revolting details! And
+what had Fancett meant? It must all come out now--his presence in Cuba
+with Savina--in a storm of publicity and condemnation. He regretted
+this, because of Savina, dead. Alive she would have smiled her contempt;
+but death was different. Anyone would acknowledge that. The dead should
+be protected from slurs and scandal and obscene comments. A confusion
+of small facts poured through him, and broke into trivial fragments any
+single dignity of emotion; no generous sorrow saved him from the
+petty actuality of his situation; even his sense of loss, he realized
+dismayed, was dull.
+
+Savina was rapidly growing, at last, cold; her arm was stiffening in the
+position in which he had left it; in a necessary forcible gentleness he
+composed her body. But he didn't hide her--not yet--with a sheet.
+That would follow soon enough. The blueness was receding, leaving
+her pinched, but white. She had always been pale.... By God, he had
+forgotten to tell them. Lee, stumbling down the stairs, found Daniel,
+the doctor, and the proprietor of the hotel, Venalez, talking together.
+As he approached there was a flash of premonition on his brother's broad
+unstirring face. Lee said humbly:
+
+"She is dead."
+
+Fancett, with Daniel Randon, went up at once, but he lingered, facing
+the Cuban. Venalez had a long brown countenance, with a disordered
+moustache. His trousers were thrust into the customary dingy boots,
+but his shirt was confined at the waist, and he had dispensed with a
+machete. He grew uneasy under Lee's stare, and shuffled his feet; then,
+behind a soiled thin hand, he coughed. It was clear that he wished
+intensely to escape, but was held by his conceptions of the obligations
+of conduct. "The suddenness--" Lee said, and then paused with a furrowed
+brow; "that's what surprises me. She was as well as you, and singing,
+yes--singing, that she didn't want to be a wife. I thought she had
+tripped on the loose silk thing she wore; and then I was certain that
+she had fainted from your heat." He bore heavily on the word your, and
+then proceeded to curse the atmosphere, in a heavy manner suggesting
+that it were a property, a condition, under the direction of the hotel
+proprietor. From that he proceeded to damn Utica and the state of Ohio.
+
+"But you can't understand me," he added, illogically angry at that, too.
+Daniel was again at his side, speaking. "There is nothing for you to
+do here, and you may as well come to the batey with me. There are some
+accidents that cannot be provided against. This is one of them. She will
+be attended to; but you must explain about the cables."
+
+"I had better get her things," Lee replied. He couldn't leave the
+delicate and beautiful trifles of Savina's living in the blue vault
+above. "They were scattered about the room." That, as well, Daniel
+assured him, had not been neglected. Her effects were to go over in
+the wagon with them. Lee, jolting on a springless contrivance over
+an informal road, kept his hand on the bags beside him. They were in
+Holland cases which hid the sets of initials ending in G. A revolver was
+shoved under the leather seat at the driver's left. There were the negro
+women, half naked, lounging in their doorways.
+
+Telling himself that Savina was dead, he lingered over that term, at
+once so definite and obscure. There had been a pain in her heart at the
+Dos Hermanos, while they were having dinner, after the steamer, blazing
+with lights and with music on the upper deck, had swept out of the
+harbor. And, since then, at night, she had cried out. That, he had
+thought, was the expression of her consuming passion. He hadn't killed
+her; he would correct Fancett there. The doctor's glance, almost
+suspicious, had been intolerable. Savina had whispered to him, at the
+end, that she was sorry for nothing; she had begged him to be happy.
+
+He roused himself and asked Daniel if they had far to go, and learned
+that they had almost reached the batey. Where, Lee added silently,
+Daniel wouldn't have us. It might well have saved Savina. The same
+ideas persisted in his mind. He wondered if, in the hurried packing, her
+handkerchief had been neglected? It was one of a number that Savina had
+bought in Havana. He had stayed outside, in the motor, smoking; and,
+when she had rejoined him, after a long wait, she had displayed her
+purchases. Her voice had been animated with pleasure at their reasonable
+price. Things small and unimportant! His brain worked mechanically, like
+a circling toy that had been tightly wound up and must continue until
+its spring was expanded.
+
+The fundamental calamity was too close for any grasp of its tragic
+proportions: Savina dead was far more a set of unpredictable
+consequences than a personality. Alive she had drawn him into herself;
+she had, with her body, shut out the world of reality if not of mental
+query. Even the fervor of Cuba had seemed to pale before her burning
+spirit. What, without knowing it, Dr. Fancett had meant--a thing Lee
+himself had foreseen--was that Savina had killed herself, she had been
+consumed by her own flame. But she hadn't regretted it. That assurance,
+bequeathed to him in the very hush of death, was of massive importance.
+Nothing else mattered--she had been happy with him. At last, forgetful
+of the ending, he had brought her freedom from a life not different from
+a long dreary servitude. He would need to recall this, to remind himself
+of it, often in the years that would leadenly follow; for he must
+be regarded as a murderer--the man who, betraying William Grove, had
+debauched and killed his wife.
+
+That, of course, was false; but what in the world that would judge,
+condemn, him wasn't? He had his memories, Savina's words. A sharper
+sense of deprivation stabbed at him. Why, she was gone; Savina was dead.
+Her arms would never again go around his neck. The marks of the mules
+across her narrow feet! He put out a shaking hand, and Daniel Randon met
+it, enveloped it, in a steady grasp that braced him against the lurching
+of the wagon.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+On the veranda of Daniel Randon's house Lee sat pondering over his
+brother's emphatic disconnected sentences. "This conventionality, that
+you have been so severe with, is exceedingly useful. It's not too much
+to say indispensable. Under its cover a certain limited freedom is
+occasionally possible. And where women are concerned--" he evidently
+didn't think it necessary even to find words there. "The conventions,
+for example, stronger in William Grove than his feelings, saved the
+reputation of his wife; they kept Fanny alive and, with her heroic and
+instinctive pride, made it possible for you to go back to Eastlake. If
+you choose, of course. I can't enter into that. But, if you decide to
+return, you won't be supported by noble memories of your affair--was it
+of love or honor?--no, an admirable pretence must assist you. The
+other, if you will forgive me, is no more than the desire for a cheap
+publicity, a form of self-glorification. Expensive. The proper clothes,
+you see--invaluable! The body and the intentions underneath are
+separate. It is only the thoughtless, the hasty and the possessed who
+get them confused."
+
+The veranda occupied all four sides of Daniel Randon's low, wide-roofed
+dwelling, continuous except for the break where an open passage led to
+a detached kitchen. Seated in an angle which might be expected to catch
+the first movement of the trade winds sweeping, together with night,
+from the sea, practically the whole of the batey was laid out before
+Lee. The sun was still apparent in a rayless diffusion above a horizon
+obliterated in smoke, a stationary cloud-like opacity only thinning
+where the buildings began: the objects in the foreground were sharp;
+but, as the distance increased, they were blurred as though seen through
+a swimming of the vision. The great bulk of the sugar mill, at the left,
+like--on the flatness of the land--a rectangular mountain shaken by a
+constant rumbling, was indistinct below, but the mirador lifted against
+the sky, the man there on look-out, were discernible. The mill, netted
+in railroad tracks, was further extended by the storage house for
+bagasse--the dry pulpy remnant of the crushed cane--and across its front
+stood a file of empty cars with high skeleton sides. There was a noisy
+backing and shifting of locomotives among the trains which, filled with
+sugar cane, reached in a double row out of sight.
+
+The cars were severally hauled to the scales shed, weighed, and then
+shoved upon a section of track that, after they were chained, sharply
+tilted and discharged the loads into a pit from which the endless belt
+of a cane carrier wound into the invisible roller crushers. The heavy
+air was charged with the smooth oiled tumult of machinery, the blast
+whistles of varied signals, and the harshness of escaping steam. Other
+houses, smaller than Daniel's but for the rest resembling it, were
+strung along the open--the dwellings of the Assistant Administrador,
+the Chief Electrician, a Superintendent, and two or three more that Lee
+hadn't identified. He had been, now, nearly four weeks with Daniel, and
+the details of La Quinta, the procedure of the sugar, were generally
+familiar to him.
+
+However, he had had very little opportunity to talk to his brother: the
+difficulties, in Cobra and Havana, of shipping Savina's body back to New
+York--William Grove, persuaded that it was unnecessary, hadn't come to
+Cuba; a fire in one of the out-lying colonias of the La Quinta estate,
+that had destroyed three caballerias of ratoon; the sheer tyranny of an
+intricate process which, for seven months in the year, was not allowed
+to pause, had kept Lee from any satisfactory communication of his
+feelings or convictions. But, at last, returning hot and fatigued from
+the clearing, by fire, of a tumba, Daniel had been sitting with him
+for more than an hour, and he showed no signs of immediate change or
+activity.
+
+"What you say is clear enough," Lee Randon admitted; "and yet--but I
+can't see where--there is a sophistry in it." Daniel made a gesture
+both curt and indifferent. "I tell you it would be better, even at the
+destruction of the entire present world, to establish honesty. Since
+you have referred to me--what we, Savina and I, did was, simply, honest;
+but, again as you pointed out, its effect around us, for bad or very
+possibly good, was brought to nothing by the way it was drawn back into
+the victorious conspiring of sham. Even I don't know which, commendable
+or fatal, it was; I haven't been able to find out; I hadn't time. But
+Savina preferred the two weeks we had together to an infinity of the
+other. Fancett may call it an acute dilatation of the heart, but it was
+happiness that killed her. It's possible for me to say that because,
+fundamentally, I didn't bring it to her. Savina found it, created it,
+for herself. Through that time--was it long or short? The two weeks
+seemed a life--she was herself, superior."
+
+"How about you?"
+
+"I was absolutely contented," Lee replied.
+
+"Isn't that a pale word for an act of passion?"
+
+"Perhaps. It may be." A troubled expression settled over Lee's eyes.
+"There is something I should like to explain to you, Daniel, to ask you
+about, but it would take a great many words?" He cast this in the tone
+of a query, and palpably waited for the encouragement to proceed fully;
+but Daniel Randon was persistently non-committal. He had no intention,
+he said, of urging Lee to any speech he might later regret and wish
+unpronounced. "It's about my attitude toward Savina," Lee proceeded; "or
+it may be about a doll; I don't know. No, Savina and the doll weren't as
+distinct as you'd suppose; they were, in the beginning and at the
+end, one: Savina and Cytherea. That has given me some wretched hours;
+because, when it was over, I didn't miss Savina, I couldn't even call
+her individually back to my mind; and the inhumanity of that, the sheer
+ingratitude, was contemptible.
+
+"I can explain it best by saying that Cytherea had always represented
+something unknown that I wanted, that always disturbed me and made me
+dissatisfied. She was more fascinating than any living woman; and her
+charm, what she seemed to hint at, to promise, filled me with the
+need to find it and have it for my own. That desire grew until it was
+stronger than anything else, it came between everything else and me and
+blinded me to all my life--to Fanny and the children and my companies.
+But, before I saw Cytherea, I was ready for her:
+
+"Because of the conventions you uphold as being necessary to--to
+comfort, nothing greater. My life with Fanny had fallen into a
+succession of small wearing falsehoods, pretences. I had made a mistake
+in the choice of a career; and, instead of dropping that blunder, I
+spent my energy and time in holding it up, supporting it, assuring
+myself that it was necessary. The most I would acknowledge, even
+privately, was that, like the majority of men, I hated work. Like
+so many men I was certain that my home, my wife, were absorbing as
+possible. Wherever I looked, other lives were built of the same labored
+and flimsy materials. Mine was no worse; it was, actually, far better
+than most. But only better in degree, not in kind. It occupied about a
+fifth of my existence, and the rest was made up of hours, engagements,
+that were a total waste.
+
+"At one time I had enjoyed them, I couldn't have thought of more
+splendid things; but the spirit of that period was not the same, and it
+was the spirit which made them desirable. I suppose that could be called
+my love for Fanny. I was glad to sit and discuss the hem of her skirt
+with her. It was enough just to be coming home to the house where she
+was waiting. I tell you, Daniel, my life then was transfigured. How long
+did it last--four years, six, eight? I can't be exact; but if I speak of
+its duration you will guess that it went. It went slowly, so slowly that
+for a long while I was ignorant of what was happening. It left in the
+vanishing of the little lubrications you insist are as needful for
+society as for your machinery. They began as lubrications, evasions, to
+keep the wheels turning smoothly, and they ended as grains of sand in
+the bearings.
+
+"First there was Fanny's convention of modesty--it had been put into her
+before birth--which amounted to the secret idea that the reality of love
+was disgusting. She could endure it only when feeling swept her from her
+essential being. When that had passed she gathered her decency around
+her like Susanna surprised. Positively she had the look of a temporary
+betrayal. So that, you see, was hidden in a cloak of hypocrisy. Then she
+had the impracticable conviction that I existed solely in her, that
+she was a prism through which every feeling and thought I had must be
+deflected. Fanny didn't express this openly, it had too silly a
+sound, but underneath, savagely, she fought and schemed and lied--more
+conventions--for it. And, when the children were born, she was ready for
+them with such a mountain of pretty gestures and ideas that I gave them
+up: I couldn't fight their mother and the nurses and the maids in
+the kitchen--the whole bloody nice world. For one thing I wasn't home
+enough; when I got in for dinner they were either in bed or starched for
+their curtesies and kisses. They are superior children, Daniel; yet what
+they were taught to say sounds like the infantile sentimentalities of
+the stage."
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+The capataz of the batey gang, a tall flushed Jamaican negro, passed
+on a cantering white pony. The American wives, the flowers of Utica and
+Ohio, went by in light afternoon dresses, one propelling a baby in a
+cart. The Field Superintendent, lank and sun-dark under a green palmetto
+hat, wearing a grotesquely large revolver, saluted Daniel from the open.
+"Trouble at the cantina barracon," he called cheerfully.
+
+"It was then," Lee specified, "that all my loose ends were gathered up
+in Cytherea. I have, I think, explained her. She was a doll, but it is
+more useful, now, to picture her as a principle. I didn't realize that
+at first: I took her to be an individual, the image of a happy personal
+fate that, somehow, I had missed, but might still catch up with.
+
+"The wildest kind of a dream," Lee Randon proclaimed. "But when I
+became aware of Savina, or rather of her passion, I was sure I had been
+completely justified. She was, I believed, Cytherea. They looked alike.
+They were the same! However, I mistook that sameness. I can understand
+now, very clearly; it seems incredible that I had been so blind, so
+fatuous, Daniel. I actually thought that there was a choice, a special
+graciousness, existing and reserved for me." He laughed, not bitterly,
+but in a wonderment that bordered on dismay. "I felt that I had found it
+in Savina. I did get a lot there--more than I should have hoped for--but
+not precisely that. At last I know." His voice was grave, and he paused
+that Daniel might grasp the weight of what was to follow. "I had made
+the mistake of thinking that I, as an individual, had any importance.
+In my insane belief that a heavenly beauty, a celestial chorus girl,
+was kept for me, I pictured myself as an object of tender universal
+consideration.
+
+"Damned anthropomorfic rot!
+
+"It was a principle all the while," he cried; "a principle that would
+fill the sky, as vast as space; and ignorant, careless, of me, it
+was moving to its own end. And that--do you see, Daniel?--had grown
+destructive. It had begun differently, naturally, in the healthy
+fertility of animals and simple lives; but the conceit of men, men like
+me, had opposed and antagonized it. Magnifying our sensibilities, we had
+come to demand the dignity of separate immortalities. Separate worms!
+We thought that the vitality in us was for the warming of our own hearts
+and the seduction of our nerves. And so I left the safety of a species,
+of Fanny and children, for the barrenness of Cytherea.
+
+"That's her secret, what she's forever smiling at--her power, through
+men's vanity, to conquer the earth. She's the reward of all our fineness
+and visions and pleasure, the idol of our supreme accomplishment:
+the privilege of escaping from slavery into impotence, the doubtful
+privilege of repaying the indignities of our birth." His rigid strained
+face was drenched with sweat. "We made her out of our longing and
+discontent, an idol of silk and gilt and perverse fingers, and put
+her above the other, above everything. She rewarded us, oh, yes--with
+promises of her loveliness. Why shouldn't she be lovely eternally in the
+dreams of men?
+
+"Then, finally, Savina and Cytherea were merged again. In Savina her
+passion, always abnormal, hadn't been spent; there she was younger than
+the youngest girl I knew; incomparably more dangerous. She, too, had
+been constrained by the artificial, by conventionality; and when
+the moment of reality came it broke William Grove, Fanny, Helena and
+Gregory--all the threads that precariously held us. She was stronger
+than I, Savina was the goal and I was only the seeker--that was the
+difference between us--and in absorbing me she was content."
+
+"That is very ingenious," Daniel told him. "Do you notice that the smoke
+is thicker in the east?"
+
+"Not more in one direction than in another," Lee answered indirectly;
+"in the east and south, the north and west, up above and underneath.
+It's a good thing for our comfort that there's so much of it we can't
+see the fires. If the books of physics are to be credited, the center
+of the earth is liquid flame; certainly it is hot enough here to suggest
+something of the sort."
+
+"It is worse in Oriente," Daniel informed him.
+
+"What I have said," Lee Randon continued, "came from my remark, the
+one you disagreed with, about the need of an understanding everywhere!
+Isolated, in a chance individual like me, it is worse than useless,
+fatal. It destroys the support of a common cause with a humanity only
+less resentful than sentimental. And this has brought me to the reason
+why--in spite of her splendid proposal--I can't go back to Fanny: I
+have grown too detached to give her effort a possibility of success, of
+happiness for her."
+
+"If you are so cursed abstract, you may as well be in Eastlake as at La
+Quinta," his brother asserted.
+
+"Your saying that is curious," Lee replied, "for it is exactly what I
+told a man, in circumstances remarkably like my own, not long ago. I
+explained that life was all monotonously alike; and that, therefore, it
+didn't really matter where he changed to. I still think that most of
+it is inexcusable, perhaps hopeless, but I can't subscribe to it. What
+Fanny wants is contrition and the return to a time forever lost. I
+shouldn't be able to persuade her that I hadn't been in a temporary
+fever which, if she were sufficiently careful, would go and leave things
+very much as they were. That is her strength, her necessity, and she
+must uphold it until farthest old age and death."
+
+Daniel Randon rose and went to the railing of the veranda, gazing
+intently into the hidden east. "You are right," he said, crediting Lee
+with a contention he hadn't made; "that is the refuse on Jagües."
+
+"Helena and Gregory don't need me," Lee went on and on; "or, if you
+prefer--I am no longer afraid of words--I don't need them. I believe, in
+nature, that the length of paternity is measured by the helplessness of
+the young. An elephant is more devoted than a crow. My obligation was
+soon ended."
+
+"Bring it down to this," Daniel's brevity was explicit: "what in the
+devil are you going to do?"
+
+"I haven't any idea beyond the realization that I can't stay here taking
+up your room and Juan's time. It seems to me that for a month he has
+done nothing but concern himself with my comfort. I did, in Havana,
+while Savina was living, think of writing; but I have given it up
+because it would involve me in so much that is disagreeable. The amazing
+fact is that, since I have acquired a degree of wisdom, there is nothing
+for me to do, nowhere to go. The truth, I have always heard, will make
+you free; but for what, Daniel? What is it the truth will make you free
+for except to live in the solitude of public hatred? When I refuse, as
+I certainly shall, to return to Fanny the world where I might accomplish
+something will be closed to me.
+
+"I could be a farmer if it weren't for the impossibility of my sleeping
+through the early part of the night; my hands are too stiff to learn
+a trade. I don't want to learn a trade!" he exclaimed. "And as for
+starting more stock companies, rolling greater quantities of refuse into
+cigarettes or bottling harmless colored water, or controlling a news
+sheet in the interest of my other interests--" he could think of no term
+sufficiently descriptive of his remoteness from all that. "I shall have
+to be what a universal Eastlake will prefer to call me. I'd stay here,
+at La Quinta, if you could find something for me to do--like picking the
+limes fresh for the Daiquiri cocktails. Do you think your company would
+carry me on its rolls for that? I could gather them in the morning and
+evening, when it was cooler. Thank God, I haven't any material ambition.
+I like the clothes, the life, of that nigger, the capataz, who rode by,
+as well as most. I'd sit up on the mirador and keep--what do you call
+it?--the veija, for months on end."
+
+The servant, Juan, small and dark in his white house coat, appeared with
+a tray on which two glasses with stems held a fragrant amber liquid.
+
+"That is perfection," Lee murmured; "where else could it be found?
+Advise me, Daniel," his voice was both light and serious. "You have
+never been known to give advice, but certainly my case is unusual enough
+to warrant extraordinary pains. Shall I make a neat hole at the proper
+point in my skull; or, better yet, put half a grain of a drug that will
+occur to you on my tongue and close my mouth on further indiscretions?
+That has its aspects. But not so strongly after one of Juan's drinks;
+they are distilled illusions, vain dreams still of hope. They have all
+the brave ring of accomplishment without its effort. But I can see the
+end even of them--atrophy. Soon Cytherea will go into the attic, have
+her nose broken, and the rats will eat the clothes from her indifferent
+body. Cytherea on a pearl shell in the Ionic Sea... I was one of her
+train, Daniel." He leaned sharply forward--
+
+Daniel Randon was asleep.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Cytherea, by Joseph Hergesheimer
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