Nothing in his life, no throe of
passion or gratification, had been like this. Lee hastily poured out a
drink and swallowed it. He was burning up, he thought; it felt as
though a furnace were open at his back; and he went out to the silence,
the coldness, of the terrace flagging on the lawn. The lower window
shades had been pulled down, but, except in the dining-room, they
showed no blur of brightness. Through the walls the chords of the piano
were just audible, and the volume of voices was reduced to a formless
humming.
It had cleared, the sky was glittering with constellations of stars;
against them Lee could trace the course of his telephone wire. But for
that his house, taking an added dignity of mass from the night, might
have been the reality of which it was no more than an admirable
replica. There was little here, outside, to suggest or recall the
passage of a century and over. In the lapse of that time, Lee thought,
more had been lost than gained; the simplicity had vanished, but wisdom
had not been the price of its going.
Of all the people at present in his dwelling, Fanny was the best in the
sense of old solid things; he could see her, with no change, at the
board of an early household. Compared to her the others seemed like
figures in a fever; yet he was, unhappily, with them rather than with
Fanny. God knew there was fever enough in his brain! But the winter
night was cooling it--a minor image of the final office of death; the
choking hunger for Savina was dwindling.
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