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.