"
"If you were someone else," Mrs. Craddock observed, "I'd think you were
in love. You have a great many of the symptoms--the wandering eye and
wild speech."
"I am, with Fanny," he declaimed, struggling out of the bench corner.
No one should discover the memory he carried everywhere with him. The
lights had been switched off in the living-room, but the piano
continued, and glowing cigarettes, like red and erratically waving
signals, were visible. Returning, going into the dining-room, he saw
that the whiskey had been plentifully spilled over the table. In the
morning the varnish would be marred by white stains. The stairs were
occupied, the angle in the hall behind which a door gave to the cellar
steps, was filled; a sound, not culinary, came from the kitchen pantry.
Even Fanny, with her hair in disorder, was dancing an eccentric step
with Borden Rodman. All this vibrating emotion created in him, sudden
and piercing, a desire for Savina.
He wanted her, the touch of her magnetic hands, her clinging body, her
passionate abandon, with every sense. It was unbearable that she, too,
wasn't here, waiting for him in the convenient darkness. He had to have
her, he muttered. At the same time he was appalled by the force of his
feeling: it shook him like a chill and gripped his heart with an acute
pain. His entire being was saturated with a longing that was at once a
mental and physical disturbance.
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