" They left the dining-room
with her arm about him and his hand laid on her shoulder. Lee's feeling
was curious--he recognized Fanny's desirability, he loved her beyond
all doubt, and yet physically she had now no perceptible influence on
him. He was even a little embarrassed, awkward, at her embrace; and its
calmly possessive pressure filled him with a restive wish to move away.
He repressed this, forced himself to hold her still, repeated silently
all that she had given him; and she turned a face brilliant with color
to his gaze. Fanny made him bring her stool--how sharply Savina's heels
had dug into him under the table at the Lafayette--and showed him her
ankles. "You see, I put them on tonight for you." Her stockings, he
assured her, were enchanting. A difficulty that, incredibly, he had not
foreseen weighed upon him: the body, where Fanny was concerned, had
given place to the intellect; the warmth of his feeling had been put
aside for the logic of determination; and he was sick with weariness.
In his customary chair, he sank into a heavy brooding lethargy, a
silence, in which his hands slowly and stiffly clenched.
* * * * *
On the following morning, Sunday, Lee rode with Claire Morris. Fanny,
disinclined to activity, stayed by the open fire, with the illustrated
sections of the newspapers and her ornamental sewing.
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