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.
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