Savina was far out in a tideless deep that swept the solidity
of no land.
She was plastically what he willed; blurred, drunk, with sensation, she
sat clasping rigidly the edge of his coat. But his will, he discovered,
was limited: the surges of physical desire, rising and inundating,
saturating him, broke continually and left him with the partly-formed
whirling ideas. He named, to himself, the thing that hung over them; he
considered it and put it away; he deferred the finality of their
emotion. In this he was inferior, he became even slightly ridiculous--
they couldn't continue kissing each other with the same emphasis hour
after hour, and the emphasis could not be indefinitely multiplied;
rather than meet the crescendo he drew into his region of cental
obscurity.
Lee had to do this, he reminded himself, in view of Savina's utter
surrender: he was responsible for whatever happened. Even here his
infernal queerness--that the possession of the flesh wasn't what
primarily moved him--was pursuing him: a peculiarity, he came to think,
dangerously approaching the abnormal. In addition to that, however, he
was not ready, prepared, to involve his future; for that, with Savina
Grove, was most probable to follow. Fanny was by no means absent from
his mind, his wife and certain practical realities. And, as he had told
himself before, he was not a seducer.
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