It fascinated and disturbed
Lee: it had a definite interest, a meaning, for him. Was it to this
that Savina had turned? Had the world only in the adherence to the duty
typified by Fanny left such a morass as he saw about him? Was he, Lee
Randon, instead of advancing, falling back into a past more remote than
coherent speech? Nothing, he asserted, could be further from his
intention and hope. Yet, without doubt, he was surrounded by the denial
of order, of disciplined feeling; and, flatly, it terrified him.
Lee insisted, hastily, that what he wanted--no, demanded--was not this
destruction of responsibility, a chaos, mentally and sensually, but the
removal of it as a rigid mob imposition on the higher discretion of his
individuality. The thing which, with Savina, he had assaulted was, in
its way, as unfortunate as the single reeking street of Cobra. Again,
the scene around him wasn't hypocritical, its intention was as thickly
evident as the rice powder on the black sweating faces of the
prostitutes. Hypocrisy was peculiarly the vice of civilization. His
necessity was an escape from either fate--the defilement of a pandering
to the flesh and the waste of a negation with neither courage nor
rapture. Damn it, couldn't he be freed from one without falling into
the other? Lee told himself that it must be possible to leave
permanently the fenced roads of Eastlake for the high hills; it wasn't
necessary to go down into the bottoms, the mire.
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