I suppose that could be
called my love for Fanny. I was glad to sit and discuss the hem of her
skirt with her. It was enough just to be coming home to the house where
she was waiting. I tell you, Daniel, my life then was transfigured. How
long did it last--four years, six, eight? I can't be exact; but if I
speak of its duration you will guess that it went. It went slowly, so
slowly that for a long while I was ignorant of what was happening. It
left in the vanishing of the little lubrications you insist are as
needful for society as for your machinery. They began as lubrications,
evasions, to keep the wheels turning smoothly, and they ended as grains
of sand in the bearings.
"First there was Fanny's convention of modesty--it had been put into
her before birth--which amounted to the secret idea that the reality of
love was disgusting. She could endure it only when feeling swept her
from her essential being. When that had passed she gathered her decency
around her like Susanna surprised. Positively she had the look of a
temporary betrayal. So that, you see, was hidden in a cloak of
hypocrisy. Then she had the impracticable conviction that I existed
solely in her, that she was a prism through which every feeling and
thought I had must be deflected. Fanny didn't express this openly, it
had too silly a sound, but underneath, savagely, she fought and schemed
and lied--more conventions--for it.
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