It had disturbed him with the suggestion of a false, a forced, note. In
a situation of the utmost accomplishable reality it had been vague,
meaningless. I love you. It was a strange phrase, at once empty and
burdened with illimitable possibilities. He had said it times without
number to Fanny, but first--how seductively virginal she had been--on a
veranda at night. Then, though not quite for the first time, he had
kissed her. And suddenly her reserve, her protecting chastity, had gone
out of her forever.
When had the other, all that eventually led to Savina, begun; when had
he lost his love? A long process of turning from precisely the orderly
details which, he had decided, should make marriage safe. He was back
where he had started--the realization of how men deserted utility for
visions, at the enigmatic smile of Cytherea. A sterile circle. Some men
called it heaven, others found hell. His mental searching, surrounded,
met, by nullity, he regarded as his supreme effort in the direction of
sheer duty. If whoever had it in command chose to run the world
blindly, unintelligibly, in a manner that would soon wreck the
strongest concern, he wasn't going to keep on annoying himself with
doubts and the dictates of a senseless conscience. What, as soon as
possible, he'd do was fall asleep.
The crowing of a rooster pierced the thinning night, a second answered
the first, and they maintained a long self-glorifying, separated duet.
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