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Updated: May 31, 2025
He put his glass down abruptly and tramped from wall to wall, his unbuttoned silk waistcoat swinging about his arms. Lee Randon now cursed himself, he cursed Savina, but most of all he cursed William Grove, sleeping in complacent ignorance beside his wife. His imagination, aroused and then defrauded, became violent, wilfully obscene, and his profanity emerged from thought to rasping sound.
"It wasn't Savina who did this," he informed her; "I want you to realize that fully. Whatever happens, she is not to blame. All, all the fault is mine; it would take too long to explain, you wouldn't believe me you couldn't and so I am deserting you. That is the word for it, the one you will use." Fanny gazed at him in a clouding perplexity. "I can't think it's true." Her voice was dazed.
"Shall we be late for the theatre?" he asked indifferently. "I haven't the least interest in it," Savina assured him; "I can't imagine why we bought the seats. Why did we, Lee, when we have each other?" "Our own private Folly." He smiled at her. "Not that" she reproved him; "I can't bear to think of it in a small way.
But most assuredly he would, for three reasons Savina, Fanny, and himself; there might, even, be two more, Helena and Gregory; yes, and William Loyd Grove. What a stinking mess it was all turning out to be. Why wasn't life, why weren't women, reasonable? But he could not convince himself that anything final a separation threatened them.
For all her exactness, Savina Grove had a very exclusive and definite attractiveness; and, faced by such a dilemma, Lee had the best of reasons for doubting the ultimate regularity of his response. But he was, he thought, mentally halting, racing absurdly to unjustified conclusions; nothing, naturally, disturbing would arise; but that assurance, the heights of reason, soon faded.
There were the negro women, half naked, lounging in their doorways. Telling himself that Savina was dead, he lingered over that term, at once so definite and obscure. There had been a pain in her heart at the Dos Hermanos, while they were having dinner, after the steamer, blazing with lights and with music on the upper deck, had swept out of the harbor.
It is a cruel study of women, for Fanny, the model of the domestic virtues, has lost her innocent certainties of the triumph of the right and at the first conflict with Cytherea becomes a common scold; cruel to Savina Grove, who, in spite of her exquisiteness, is only a psychoanalyst's problem; cruel to us all in exposing so ruthlessly how distressing it is to live by stale morality, yet how devastating to act with no guide but illusory desire.
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.
It's all right for them to do this, to go out to an appointment after ten o'clock and come back at two satisfied " "Savina," he interrupted her, "I know all that you were going to say, I could repeat it to you in your own words. You were about to assault the double standard. Consider it done. You are right. Everyone with sense is right there.
He wanted to understand himself, and, in that, Fanny and the children ... and Savina. Obviously they were all bound together in one destiny, by a single cause. Why had he stopped loving Fanny and had no regret but a sharp gladness in his adultery with Savina?
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