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.
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