Everywhere, Lee felt, they repelled him. Was
he, then, lacking in the qualities, the warmth, of paternity? Again, as
he was helpless where Fanny lately was concerned, he was unable to be
other.
It was increasingly evident that he had not been absorbed, obliterated,
in marriage; an institution which, from the beginning, had tried--like
religion--to hold within its narrow walls the unconfinable instincts of
creation. It hadn't, among other things, considered the fascination of
Cytherea; a name, a tag, as intelligible as any for all his dissent.
But cases like his were growing more prevalent; however, usually, in
women. Men were the last stronghold of sentimentality. His thoughts
were interrupted by a dramatic rift in the discipline of the class: a
boy, stubbornly seated, swollen, crimson, with wrath and heroically
withheld tears, was being vainly argued with by the dancing master. He
wouldn't stir, he wouldn't dance. The man, grasping a shoulder, shook
him in a short violence, and then issued a final uncompromising order.
The boy rose and, marching with an increasing rapidity toward the
entrance, he struck aside a placid and justifiably injured child,
dragged open the door, and slammed it after him with a prodigious and
long echoing report. His contempt, holding its proportion in the
reduced propriety of the occasion, was like a clap of communistic
thunder in an ultra-conservative assembly.
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