I
suppose the wonderful thing is that we escaped. Lee, do you realize
that almost no one does? They never never get away, but go from one
grave, from one winter, to another. Isn't it strange, when what we did
is so very easy.
"I'd like to tell a hundred people in New York that they could get away
too, unfreeze themselves. When we drove horses I used to be surprised
that they went along so quietly in blinders; they never seemed to learn
that one kick would break into splinters the thing dragging on them.
People are like that, I was and you were, too--in blinders. We've torn
ours off, Lee. Tell me that you are glad." He was, without reserve.
Tranquilly finding his razors, he was aware of a permeating contentment
in what they had done. It was exactly as Savina had said--the forces
which had held them in a rigorous northern servitude had proved, upon
assault, to be no more than a defense of painted prejudices, the canvas
embrasures of hypocrisy.
"It is astonishing, what so many people put up with," he agreed; "but
then," Lee added, in a further understanding, "it isn't so much what
you knock down as what you carry away, take everywhere, inside you.
When an arrangement like ours fails, that, mostly, I suspect, is the
cause. It needs a special sort of fitness. Take the hundred people you
spoke of--I'd be willing to bet not five of them could get away from
the past, or put out of their minds what they are brought up on.
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