It wasn't simply, here, that he had kissed a married woman;
there was nothing revolutionary or specially threatening in that; it
was the sensation of danger, of lightning, the recognition of that
profoundly disturbing countenance, which filled him with gravity and a
determined plan of restraint.
He recalled the fact that both Peyton Morris and Mina had insisted that
they had not been responsible for what had overtaken them; at the time
he had not credited this, he was certain that some significant
preliminaries had been indulged in; but positively Savina and he had
been swept off their feet. A sense of helplessness, of the extreme
danger of existence, permeated and weakened his opposing determination
--he had no choice, no freedom of will; nothing august, in him or
outside, had come to his assistance. In addition to this, he was--as in
maturity he had always been--without a convenient recognition of right
and wrong. What he principally felt about Savina was a helpless sense
of tragedy, that and a hatred for the world, for the tepid society,
which had no use for high passion.
To have kissed her, under the circumstances, appeared to him not only
natural, but inevitable; and he was suffering from no feeling of guilt;
neither toward William Grove, in whose house he was a guest, nor to
Fanny--those widely heralded attitudes were largely a part of a public
hypocrisy which had no place in the attempted honesty of his thoughts.
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