But in the shape above him it had been strangely modified from an
apparently original purpose, made infinitely difficult if not
impossible of understanding. His Cytherea bore the traces, the results,
of old and lost and polished civilizations; there was about her even a
breath of immemorial China. It mingled with a suggestion of Venice, the
eighteenth century Venice of the princes of Naxos--how curiously she
brought back tags of discarded reading!--and of the rococo Viennese
court. This much he grasped; but the secret of her fascination, of
what, at heart, she represented, what in her had happened to love,
entirely escaped him.
Lee was interested in this, he reassured his normal intelligence,
because really it bore upon him, upon the whole of his married life
with Fanny. He wasn't, merely, the victim of a vagrant obsession, the
tyranny of a threatening fixed idea. No, the question advanced without
answer by Cytherea was not confined to her, it had very decidedly
entered into him, and touched, practically, everyone he knew, everyone,
that was, who had a trace of imagination. Existence had been enormously
upset, in a manner at once incalculable and clear, by the late war.
Why, for example, the present spirit of restlessness should
particularly affect the relation of men and women he couldn't begin to
grasp. Not, he added immediately, again, that it had clouded or shaken
his happiness.
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